The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (27 page)

“Oh, it's you. I thought you'd be back. Stephen rang last night and said your constable was asking about Morgan.”

“I know he rang. I was with him.”

“Morgan was his father, but my husband. Why were you asking Stephen, not me, about him? Why were you asking about him at all?”

“I think you can guess why, Mrs. Mates,” said Charlie. “Today we're needing to speak with your mother.”

“My mother?”

They ignored her as people seemed to do in her circle, and she bumbled after them as they proceeded down the hallway and into the sitting room. No apprehension or uncertainty disfigured the face of Melanie Byatt as she sat, straight-backed, in a tall chair, gripping her cane.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Byatt,” Oddie began, looking at her unflinchingly. “I must ask you to come with us for questioning in connection with the murder of Patrick O'Hearn, and—”

“But you can't! Mother, tell them they can't!” Faced with an implacable stare, Martha turned to the policemen. “How dare you! My mother is an old woman. Can't you see how weak she is? She is in no state to—”

But Melanie Byatt was struggling up, and she now began walking to the door, paying no more attention to her daughter than if she were a buzzing fly. At the sitting room door she paused, not to look back in any sort of retrospection, but to get her breath. Then she walked magisterially down the hall and out the front door. Outside the gate a second police car had arrived, containing two uniformed policemen from Leeds, who Oddie had arranged would follow them. Over by Charmayne Churton's cottage a little knot of Ashworth residents was gathering, a ripple of whispering rising from it. They did not look threatening—a chorus rather than a rescue posse.

Melanie ignored them all. Charlie led her to the second car and helped her into the backseat. Then he went around and got in beside her, and signaled to the uniformed driver to start.

“Keighley Police station,” he said.

The car backed up, then drove toward the gate, through it, and up to Stanbury. On the whole of the quarter-hour trip to Keighley, Melanie said nothing, but stared straight ahead. Charlie thought that questioning her was going to be about as informative as Prime Minister's Question Time in the House of Commons, and a lot more silent.

 • • • 

In the farmhouse Oddie had stationed the other uniformed constable outside Ranulph Byatt's bedroom. When the artist started roaring questions and abuse, Martha pleaded to be allowed to talk with him. Reluctantly Oddie agreed, but insisted that the constable stay in the room throughout.

“Five minutes, that's all I can allow,” he said. “Then I'll expect you down in the sitting room.”

In the meantime he went downstairs and through to the kitchen. The morning's events had not stopped Mrs. Max in her preparations for lunch. But she paused in her activities to regard him balefully.

“I don't know what things are coming to,” she said, “when a sick old woman is bothered and badgered and driven away like a criminal by grown men who should know their manners better.”

“Mrs. Max, I'm investigating three possible murders,” said Oddie. The woman's jaw dropped. “Someone's age or
fragility is not going to stop me asking questions and trying to get at the truth. Do you understand me?”

Mrs. Max, after a moment, nodded.

“And that includes Ranulph Byatt himself. Now, how long has Byatt been crippled with arthritis?”

“Oh, Lord . . . Well, it came on gradually, like it usually does. Of course it was regarded as a great tragedy here, because of the paintings. There was no sign of it at the time of what they called the ‘red period' paintings. These silly labels. . . . On the other hand he
was
having difficulty when he painted those last pictures which the critics really liked. Six or seven years ago, that would be. They had to develop ways to keep him painting. He'd have been in a terrible state otherwise—if he couldn't paint, I mean. Martha took over the mixing of the colors, and was always on duty during his painting session. We had to get a new, higher chair for him. Everything was done that could be. He has so little power left in his hands, you see.”

“Yes, I see.”

“It's tragic to see him at times.”

“What about Mrs. Byatt?”

She couldn't answer for few moments.

“Oh, I'm not sure. It was slower in her case, and of course we didn't pay so much attention, weren't so worried, because it wasn't as if she did very much with her hands. I'd say she was already sometimes in pain when I came here fifteen years ago, but it's been very gradual, and she's coped accordingly.”

Through the window over the kitchen sink Mike saw the Ashworth acolytes still clustered around Charmayne Churton's front gate, still talking. From time to time
they glanced apprehensively in the direction of the farmhouse.

“Thank you, Mrs. Max,” he said, and left the kitchen.

As he walked down the hall he satisfied himself that Martha Mates had, obediently if reluctantly, put herself in the sitting room, where she seemed to be having difficulty finding anything to do. As he let himself out through the front door, Charlie and the other uniformed constable drove up and parked behind him.

“Stay with me,” he said to Charlie. He turned to the uniformed man. “Will you go and take guard duty outside the sitting room? It's where the daughter is.”

They were being watched. Any policeman is watched, either directly or out of the corners of eyes. Oddie and Charlie were both inured to it. As they sauntered up to the group it showed signs of spontaneously breaking up. Oddie held up his hand.

“Don't go. I can see you're all worried. Mrs. Byatt is simply helping us with our inquiries—I'm sure you've heard that phrase often enough on television, but it's a perfectly good one, and the truth. That's what she's doing. I'd like to ask you to do the same. Will you?”

They all after a second or two nodded, like solemn schoolchildren.

“I'd like to know how this little community formed itself. Who was the first of you to come here?”

“Oh, I was!” It was Jenny Birdsell speaking, trilling enthusiastically. “When I came there were just the Byatts here, and Mrs. Max and Joe.”

“And that would be?”

“Well, Mary Ann was three. I'm not good on dates, but she's now eighteen, so you can work it out.”

“When you say the Byatts were here, does that include the Mateses?”

“Oh, yes. Martha, Morgan, and little Stephen. He was a lovely little boy then. Such a shame . . .”

“Right. Who was next?”

“I was,” said Charmayne Churton, with something like a simper. “Ivor had his cottage reserved for him, but he was unavoidably detained.” She leered at Oddie. “So I came here and got his cottage ready,
not
that I got any thanks for it. And then Walter came, just a month or two later.”

“That's me,” said Colonel Chesney. “There were several cottages became available at that time, because Ranulph had several of them done up at once—roofed, electricity installed, just the most basic things. The rest we did ourselves, or had done for us by professional people if we hadn't the skills.”

“That was with the proceeds of the ‘purple period' paintings,” said Ivor Aston.

“I see,” said Oddie. “When exactly was this?”

“I came out in 1990,” said Aston, deliberately unembarrassed, as a snub to his sister. “Was I next? No, Mellors was already here, weren't you? I was in fact the last.”

“That's right,” said Mellors. “I came in June 1990, a month or two before Ivor.”

“But yours was not one of the newly refurbished cottages?”

“No. It had been done up for some time, and someone had been in it before me.”

“Who was that, sir?”

Mellors seemed puzzled by the question.

“Bloke called—what was it now?—Jake. Jake Felgott. A Yank.”

“And he left?”

“Found it didn't suit him. So I got his cottage.”

“Some of you will have known him, I suppose?” said Oddie, looking around. He felt rather than could have pinned down a flicker come into someone's eye.

“Several of us knew him,” said Colonel Chesney, his voice hard with distaste. “Happy-go-lucky type, practically a hobo—a very irreverent bloke.”

“Maybe he found the atmosphere of . . . admiration for Ranulph Byatt not to his liking?” suggested Oddie.

“Maybe.”

“And have any of you had any contact or communication with him since?” Oddie asked. They all shook their heads.

“Wasn't the sort who sent Christmas cards,” said Chesney. “Wouldn't have been in any hurry to make contact again. He thought us all a bit of a joke.”

“I see.” Oddie began to turn away, but as he did so Charlie asked, “Which of you have driving licenses?”

“Or can drive, whether or not you have a license,” amended Oddie.

“I do,” said Mellors. “I've always borrowed the car here when I wanted to take canvases to galleries.”

“I do too,” said Colonel Chesney. “In the British Army today you can't
not
.”

“I have one,” said Charmayne, “but I don't. Drive, that is. Ranulph always says it's impossible to
see
landscapes, let alone
feel
them, when you're whizzing by in a car. How right he is!”

“Rather ignores the fact that you might want to use one to stock up in a supermarket,” Charlie pointed out. “And you, sir?”

“I don't have one, and I can't,” said Ivor Aston. “I've never in my life sat behind a driving wheel.”

“And I don't and can't either,” said Jenny Birdsell.

“Didn't you use to be a district nurse?”

“Long ago. Used a bicycle. It's how we all got around then. They were just beginning to talk about us having cars when I decided to give it up.”

Charlie nodded, and this time he and Oddie did turn away, and left the little group. They made their way back to the farmhouse, nodded to the constable standing on sentry duty in the hall, and then took over the gloomy dining room, with the two windows that looked out on most of the surrounding cottages. Out in the lane the little group of acolytes was dispersing.

“They're off to digest things,” said Oddie.

“So are we,” said Charlie. “I hope we understand things better than they're likely to do. We need to think where all this is taking us. In other words, what really has been going on here since the Byatts moved in?”

“You think we should go in for a conjectural history?” Oddie asked. Charlie nodded. “All right, I'll begin.”

But he had to sit there for a while before he could collect his thoughts and guesses into a suitable narrative sequence.

“Round about 1981,” Oddie began, “Ranulph Byatt found himself as an artist. It happened when he witnessed the crash which killed his daughter and her new husband, or arrived to view the wreckage. Doubtless in one part of his mind he was horrified and grief-stricken, but in another part he was excited, aroused.”

“Could he have been unaware of the sadistic side of his nature?” Charlie asked.

“Probably not. But he'd never allowed it to get into his art, or maybe never found a way to use it in his art. This experience showed him the way. When he moved here he threw himself into an orgy of painting that liberated that side of him, harnessed it for artistic ends. He was releasing the fascination that pain and destruction had always had for him. And those pictures made his name.”

“And they began to get him the sort of admirers that worship unreservedly,” contributed Charlie. “What was released in him, they recognized in themselves.”

“Yes, I think so. But unacknowledged. You notice when the disciples talk about his painting they use words like
power, imagination
. Never words that would really define the appeal.” Oddie paused a moment before he took up the sequence of events. “The vividness of the memories gradually faded. The productive burst was over. But he'd recognized the source of his real genius as a painter, and so had Melanie, who had always been the totally uncritical supporter and source of inspiration. He needed a fresh stimulus, and they both knew it. And by what must have seemed a stroke of fate, he found he could both satisfy his fascination for horror and justify it by presenting it to himself and her as a piece of justice. He had the idea that his son-in-law Morgan Mates, also traveling north to Ashworth, was the cause of the accident that he had already exploited so successfully.”

“Yes—I can see how the idea originated. I've been through the case reports again, and checked with the Vehicle Registration Office in Cardiff. A witness said that the car that was speeding and cut in on Catriona's car had a number plate something like CXN and the suffix Y, and it was a sports car. Someone in the police must have
relayed this information to Byatt. The car didn't stop, of course. Mates had a BMW, with the number plate CXW and the suffix Y.”

“Rules about what could and could not be revealed to interested parties in a case were looser then,” said Oddie. “I did things in those days I shudder at now. This would have been another police force, and there would have been no reason for them to check the cars in Byatt's own family. How long that grisly pair nursed their suspicions, we don't know, nor whether there was any basis for them, but they took advantage of his wife being away to exact ‘justice.' I'd guess it was poison, something like cyanide. Cyanide is a lot less instantaneous, as a rule, than it is in detective stories.”

“Would they need help in getting it down him?”

“That's the crucial question, isn't it?”

“We can't be sure they would,” Charlie said, after reviewing in his mind the little they knew about Martha's husband. “They were still pretty able-bodied. Stephen was told that at Oxford his father was fond of cars and practical jokes. It could have been presented as a joke. They'd found out he'd been unfaithful to Martha. A mock trial. Sentence: forced to swallow an emetic. Pure guesswork, of course. But Byatt loved the consequences—the long-drawn-out, agonized death.”