The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (18 page)

“I can believe it. Why should he make an exception of O'Hearn? That's how he behaved to me all the time we were growing up here. Except when he wanted something.”

That last remark puzzled Charlie.

“What sort of thing would he want from you?”

“He was often at a loose end. Not much to do around here if nobody likes you. I'd be tinkering with a car—that's my job; I'm a car mechanic, and I've always been good wi' engines—and he'd come over and want to know what I was doing, how a car engine worked, how I knew what was wrong and what I had to do to fix it. Well, you could go so far with him and no farther: you could teach
him how an engine worked, but you couldn't teach him how to put it right when it was broken.”

“Interesting. . . . I don't feel you've got to the heart yet of why you're unhappy about your mother staying at Ashworth.”

“No. Oh, well, the
heart
is Ranulph Byatt, isn't it?”

“I suppose so. Though these days he seems sort of marginal because of his physical state.”

Joe Paisley shook his head vigorously.

“He won't be marginal, whatever his physical shape. I should have said that the heart of Ashworth is not Ranulph but Ranulph and Melanie. Always a partnership. I'm not up in this place at the moment, but as long as he's got Melanie to help him, his physical state won't get in his way.”

“Get in his way as far as what is concerned?”

“Get in the way of doing exactly what he wants. He is the most selfish man I've ever come across. He has to have what he wants, do what he wants, when he wants, come hell or high water.”

“Aren't we all a bit like that?”

Joe shook his head again.

“A
bit
like. He is
completely
like that. No one gets in his way. Totally selfish means totally ruthless. That's why I was interested in this boy saying there were limits to what he could do. Poor bloody lad. . . . If you want to know why I worry about my mum it's because she's in a community centered around Ranulph Byatt, and Ranulph Byatt is
evil
. Pure evil.”

“Don't take any notice of him,” said his mother, turning to look urgently at Charlie. “Ranulph and I have always got on well, though I'll give you he's sometimes
naughty, likes winding people up. But he's an individual, his own man. More than you can say for his daughter or his grandson, to my way of thinking.”

“Stephen interests me,” said Charlie. “He may not have escaped his grandfather's shadow, but in other respects he seems to be his own man.”

“Trouble is, the man in question is a shit,” said Joe.

“Very much out for himself, would you say?”

“Totally.”

“We're talking murder here, as you will have heard. Is Stephen capable of killing to further his own interests?”

Joe thought, then shook his head reluctantly.

“Wouldn't have thought the arrogant prat would have it in him.”

It was a testimonial of sorts.

 • • • 

“Youngsters can be very sharp, judging each other,” said Oddie when he joined Charlie at Ashworth and was told of Joe Paisley's view of Stephen. “On the other hand, they
are
a young person's views, and in any case Stephen may have grown more dangerous and decisive in the years since Joe left Ashworth.”

Charlie nodded agreement.

“What did you learn at the garage?”

“It was Stephen Mates who rang about the car, and Stephen Mates who went to collect it.”

“He'd got a bit of expertise in car repairing from Joe Paisley,” contributed Charlie. “Not enough, apparently.”

“You told me that Martha Mates talked about giving Declan a driving lesson once Stephen got the car going,” said Oddie thoughtfully. “I think the sequence of events is
clear: the car was broken down for some time, but Stephen knew enough about engines to get it going. On the night of Sunday the twentieth he drove it into Haworth, with the body in it, but it broke down on the flat bit between the two steep hills—between the station and Bridge House. He disposed of the body in a clapped-out old car in the car park of the Tandoori, and managed to push his car along to the garage. Now, the pathologist gives the whole weekend, from Friday night to Sunday night, as the likely time the boy was killed. Leaving us with a question.”

Charlie saw the point at once.

“If Declan disappeared on Friday night, and the body was shifted on Sunday night, what happened in the intervening forty-eight hours?”

“And was the body alive or dead while it was happening?” added Oddie.

The question was still hanging in the air when the phone rang, and all possibility of more interviewing was at an end.

Mrs. O'Hearn had been surprisingly easily persuaded—or possibly bounced—into flying to England. She was due in at Manchester at 2:25. After some discussion it was agreed that Charlie should collect her, and try for some informal discussion about family background on the drive back over the Pennines to Leeds. If the poor woman was up to it, of course.

Charlie didn't like waiting at airport exits carrying a placard. He'd only done it once before, and it made him feel like a low-grade courier. This time the causes of his unease were less personal and social: he was meeting a newly bereaved mother, and one who had just gone through the experience of flying for the first time. He could well imagine that her jumble of emotions, fear fighting with grief, would be difficult and embarrassing to cope with, and would need the utmost care in handling.

One further point struck him: from what little he knew about Ireland, he guessed that he would be the first black person Eileen O'Hearn would ever have had a conversation with. That presaged badly. All things considered, the going seemed likely to be sticky.

The plane was already ten minutes late. Looking around him Charlie concluded that Mrs. O'Hearn could have been told that she was being met by a black man and there would have been no possibility of confusion. The voices around him were all North Country or Irish, and the faces all white. It was at that point that the sleeve of his jacket was tugged, and he looked down at a red-eyed, fearful face, but one with an indomitable, straight mouth.

“Is it me you're meeting? Eileen O'Hearn? They told me your name and I've forgotten it entirely. I've made a terrible fool of myself on the airplane. We'd no sooner started moving and going toward the—the runway, do they call it?—than I had a terrible fit of panic and cried out to them to let me off, I couldn't face it, and I don't know what else, and people were looking at me and smiling, and there was this kind hostess—such a sweet-looking girl, she was—who came and sat beside me and held my hand and told me to close my eyes, and we talked and
before I really knew it we were in the air and in no time we were down again and they were getting me off before all the rest. I wish I'd taken her name so I could send her something—one of my best sponges, maybe, and some ginger nuts. Sure, I hate making a fool of myself in public. I've always hated people laughing at me, or pitying me, and that's what they were doing on that plane. And it's a fool I was, because what if the plane did go down? What's that when you've just lost a son, and a son as good to me as Declan was, and a good man too—everyone will tell you the same. But there, I have to think of the others, like Father Baillie said. The truth is I always favored Declan, because of his lovely nature. But it's the young ones I have to live for now, God give me strength.”

This, and more like it, got them to the car park and the car that Charlie was to drive them in to Leeds. As he bent down to open the passenger door Eileen O'Hearn's face told him that she was registering for the first time the fact that he was black: she had seen her name on the placard, which he had been holding to his chest at about her eye level, and she had not looked upward but in her sorrow and nervousness had started chattering on at once. Well, it had certainly got them over any awkwardness. He let her in, went around to the driver's seat, and set off.

“It sounds like you've got a big family,” he said. “You'll have to explain that to me. I'm an only child, and there's just me and my mother.”

“Oh, dear, your father's dead, is he? That's sad for a young chap like you are if he was a good one.” Charlie didn't explain about his father, who was not so much dead as unidentified. “The three eldest were Patrick, Declan, and Mary. Just a year or so between each o' them.” She
smiled shyly. “Then my husband got a job in America, so there's a gap. Mary's twenty this year. Then there's Anne, who's sixteen, Stephen, who's fourteen, and John Paul, who's ten. That's a larger family than people have these days, even in Ireland. But it's sad for an only child like you, isn't it? You learn about being with people by being with your own brothers and sisters.”

“I suppose I have always been a loner,” admitted Charlie, “at least at work. I prefer to go at things on my own.”

“How could you not be, with no people around you to bring you out of yourself.”

“But you say that it was Declan who was always your favorite of your children?”

“It's a dreadful mother you'll probably be thinking I am, to favor one over the rest like that. But Declan was such a nice-natured boy—no, I'll not say that. They're all very nice-natured children, even Patrick. . . . Well, Patrick has got too much of his father in him, but it's not his fault, that, and when he and Declan were together, which they always were as much as they could be, Declan would be holding him back from wrongdoing, thank the Lord.”

“They were very close?”

“They were. That's how it happens in large families, they sort of divide off. People called them the O'Hearn twins, and they were like twins, though their natures were so very different.”

“You said Patrick was like his father,” hinted Charlie delicately.

“I'd not want to speak ill of the dead,” said Mrs. O'Hearn, but it seemed more of a formality than anything deeply felt, for she went on: “But I'd not want to tell lies about him either, for fear you didn't understand about
Declan. My Jack was a big man with a bit of a temper, and he could be very rough with the children, or . . . or with anyone who got in his way when he was in the drink. And sometimes when he wasn't too.”

“And Patrick takes after him?”

“Too much. Too ready with his fists an' all. I've had to stand up to him since his father's death, make it clear that I'm not going to be my own son's punching bag. But Declan could always manage him. It looked as if it was Patrick in charge, but that wasn't the case at all. His father always wanted to ‘make a man of him,' but since Jack died I haven't stood any nonsense from Patrick.”

“And Declan, anyway, went in entirely the opposite direction, did he?”

“Oh, he did. A lovely boy.” She brought out a little scrap of handkerchief with lace edging and dabbed at her eyes. “I don't know how I can talk about him without crying, but you're a good listener. . . . I wondered whether he would be a priest, but it wasn't to be. There's hardly a soul has the vocation these days, is there? How's the Church to survive? Oh, Declan was always kind, and took endless trouble with the little ones, and stood up to his father when he was big enough—and that was brave, you'd say, if you could have seen the size of his fists.”

“How did your husband die?”

She turned to him, her eyes sharp now.

“What are you implying? There was nothing like that!”

Charlie backed off at once.

“I wasn't implying anything, Mrs. O'Hearn. We have to get the whole picture. And since by your own account your husband was a violent man, I wondered how he died.”

“I'm sorry. It's with you saying Declan was murdered.
I
can't
believe it, not Declan, not a sweet boy like that. . . . Jack was killed when scaffolding collapsed on a new building he was putting up in Rathdrum. There was few to mourn him. Even his brothers and sisters—and one or two of them are a bit too much like him to my way of thinking—even they could hardly weep for him. And I had to stop the children saying they were glad.”

“Did he leave you well off financially?”

“He did
not
. It all went over the bar. It's been a struggle, but we've managed.”

“It sounds as if your family has been a happier one since he died.”

“It has. Life has been much better, I'd not deny it. There have been difficulties, no question, but there's been no
fear
. Declan has been a rock, but of course he's young—I
can't
talk about him as if he's dead—and being a young man he wanted to see a bit of the world before he settled down. If only he'd stayed in Donclody, maybe found work in Rathdrum. Finding work is a bit easier these days in Ireland, so they tell me. . . . If he had he'd still be with us!”

She raised her handkerchief again and wept silently into it. Charlie was silent for a few minutes, as they drove through bleak Pennine landscapes. This, since the Moors murders, was landscape that was associated in the popular mind with sadistic killings. It was something that everyone tried to put out of their minds but nobody could.

“Will you tell me about Declan's decision to travel a bit?” he asked at last. Mrs. O'Hearn put her handkerchief away.

“In a way I'd expected it. It's what most young Irish people do when they're twenty or so—the young girls
maybe get jobs with children, and the boys make their ways around doing casual jobs. In the past it's been either America or Britain, but now it's often Europe. Anyway, Jack didn't leave many contacts in America, not ones you'd want a young man to take up. The way Jack got through to people in America was breaking their noses in bars. So it was to England Declan came—not that he had any contacts here, not family contacts, but it would be easier to get home if he ran out of money. He was hoping to go to Europe later on, but that would depend on his making a bit of money.”