The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (29 page)

“Well, it was the most terrible miscalculation. I blame myself, having been a nurse—but of course so rusty now! You mustn't hold Ranulph responsible in any way. Melanie rang me, as I said, and of course Ranulph's tastes are no secret from
me
, and I said to her that naturally I'd help.”

“How long had Patrick been there?”

“Since Saturday afternoon, I believe.”

“How many people knew he was there?”

“I . . . I really don't know. Possibly some did. But he busied himself around the house, helping Ranulph and Melanie, and he didn't go out to tramp the countryside or anything like that. Anyway, Melanie and Ranulph knew about my little instrument.”

“The garrote, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“An instrument of
execution
.”

“Yes,” she agreed composedly. “A memento of a trip around Spain. It was used there until
quite
recently. It was a little secret, a little joke between us, especially in view of the use I'd put it to. And it was agreed we would all do a performance for Ranulph—a mock garroting. Patrick was a rough, good-natured boy, none too sensitive. He thought it was a huge joke. Ranulph directed the details. The boy was naked . . . though afterward we put a pair of underpants on him, for decency's sake. He played up tremendously—he was really quite an actor. We tied his hands and his legs, and I played the sadistic executioner. I put the collar round his neck, and got the screw in place in the
hole. He pleaded for mercy—all part of the scenario, and
aw
fully well done! Then I began to turn the screw, and the collar tightened around his neck, and quite soon he was gagging and trying to scream, and I thought it could be tightened just a little bit more, and I'm afraid the sharp tip of the screw must have penetrated the spinal column—well, that was it for him.”

She might have been describing a tea party at which the fish paste in the sandwiches had been found to be slightly off. Oddie found he had an overwhelming urge to put an end to the charade.

“Jennifer Birdsell, I am arresting you . . .”

She remained quite calm, practicing the sort of expression she imagined martyrs assumed, and nodding at the import of his words. As the three of them got up to go out to the car, Mary Ann appeared at the top of the stairs, then followed them down into the sunlight. She said nothing, watching without emotion. A little knot of Ashworth people had gathered in the lane. Mary Ann went over and stood by Joe Paisley.

“I knew she was evil,” she said, in her clear, piercing voice. “I always recognized the Devil peering out of her eyes.”

Joe Paisley put his arm around her.

“Come on, little chicken. You're coming back with me and Mother to Burnley.”

Charlie, watching, realized suddenly that they had been children together. He waited for her reaction, hoping she would not plead an engagement to preach the Word in Keighley market. But after a moment she nodded, then buried her head in Joe's chest.

As Charlie helped Jenny Birdsell, still smiling pityingly,
into the police car, Oddie bent over and had a word in his ear.

“Go and bring in Byatt. There's no way we can avoid that now.”

“I wouldn't want to,” said Charlie. “Would you?”

But he was conscious, as he watched the car disappear up the lane and then started back toward the house, of hostility in the group of Ashworth residents, a stony-faced, implacable sort of hostility, mitigated by personal apprehension—he guessed they were conscious of the part their own passivity had played, and wondered whether that passivity amounted to complicity. The exceptions were Joe and Mary Ann: Charlie could almost feel the force with which they were egging him on to do his duty.

The front door was unlocked as they had left it, and he let himself in. Almost immediately Martha appeared in the sitting room door.

“You're going to arrest him, aren't you? You
can't
think—”

“Will you go back in, please?”

“He's ill. Can't you hear?”

He
could
hear. From upstairs came sounds that were like grunts, interspersed with small cries. Charlie was up the stairs like a flash. The sounds got louder. In the door of Byatt's bedroom he paused.

The policewoman had allowed him watercolors. Her eyes showed her regret and her bewilderment. He was sitting at a little table in the center of the room, paper covering the top of it, and on the paper a picture was taking shape. The lower part of it, a burnished brown-yellow, was circular, forming the shape of a broad collar. Above that
the outline of a face was beginning to appear, with the only features so far realized a hideously prominent pair of protruding, terrified eyes, almost popping out from the face and from the paper, and a mouth, torn apart in an agonized shriek, from which a blackened tongue was protruding.

Gradually Charlie started to make sense of the cries.

“Tighter. Turn the screw. Tighter. Kill him! Kill him!”

The old man's face was straining, the eyes filled with a corrosive lust, the feeble old limbs trembling with excitement, only the hands still applying paint being under some semblance of control.

“He'll be sectioned,” said Charlie. “There's no way they'll let him stand trial.”

Charlie was not a vengeful person, but he found he could not keep the regret from his voice.

 • • • 

Declan wondered whether he was choosing the wrong songs, or whether he had chosen the wrong street entirely. “The Mountains of Mourne” had gone down like a lead balloon, and so had “Danny Boy.” The passersby had bustled on with no reaction on their hard or harried faces. Declan had chosen Bond Street because he'd understood—mainly, it must be said, from the Monopoly board—that it was one of the resorts of the well-heeled in London. Perhaps it was true what he'd read: that the rich were rich because they had no taste for giving away money.

His eye was caught by a notice on the side door of the building that he had stationed himself outside. It was Christerby's, the art dealers. He strolled over, still plucking
the strings and turning the tuning screw of his guitar. The handwritten notice read:

WANTED
Capable young man for packing and deliveries

Underneath there was an arrow pointing to a still more obscure door. Declan went back to his pitch thoughtfully.

He launched into one of his favorites. His voice, had he but known it, was particularly responsive to the pathetic.

The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone

In the ranks of death you'll find him
.

The picture of the innocent musician in the midst of carnage and horror had always touched him. It seemed to touch the passing public too. An elderly woman, heavily made up, actually smiled, and one young man began feeling in his pocket when he was still yards away. The chink was a substantial sound. Declan refrained from looking down, but thought it could be 50 pence, or even one pound. He thought he might try “The Last Rose of Summer” next.

His mind went back to the handwritten notice. Christerby's—that was a fine firm, he was sure of it. He could just fancy working in the art world, learning more about it. Would it be a plus for him if he mentioned he'd worked for Ranulph Byatt, even mixed his colors and generally helped in the artistic process? Not if they rang Ashworth and heard how he'd decamped without warning, that was sure. But perhaps he could explain how he'd found the whole setup there unsettling, even a little sinister.

“And that's no more than the truth, so help me God,” he said to himself.

“The Last Rose” and “Home, Sweet Home” went down just as well. Several preoccupied faces betrayed by a flicker that the songs said something to them, brought back something in their past, maybe their childhood. His little cap on the pavement clinked several times, twice with satisfyingly substantial rings.

He was just bringing the song to a yearning close—for he did yearn sometimes for home, which had been a good home to him after his father had died—when he saw approaching from the direction of Savile Row a policeman with a purposeful tread. Quick as a flash he scooped up the money, popped his guitar back in its case, and, on an impulse, instead of walking up toward Oxford Street or down toward Piccadilly, turned and went to the door around the side of Christerby's that the notice directed him to.

It opened directly onto a staircase leading down. The basement, where the packing and unpacking would be done. Declan started down, wondering who it was he would have to charm or impress. He was surprised when he heard the door behind and above him open again, and heard a voice with authority.

“Excuse me.”

He turned reluctantly. It was the policeman he had seen approaching.

“Are you Declan O'Hearn?”

Declan's face showed his surprise.

“Yes. How—”

“Look, could you come back up and come with me? We can't talk here.”

Declan stood his ground.

“Why do you want to talk to me? I've moved on.”

“Could you just come up, please?”

Declan cast a regretful look back down the stairs. Perhaps it would be better to come back without his guitar. He started up the stairs again. When they got into the open air Declan looked at the policeman. He was a young man with an insignificant mustache but compassionate eyes.

“What is it?”

There was a break in Declan's voice, perhaps the result of a twinge of fear.

“Look, I think you'd better come to the station. I'm afraid I've got bad news for you.”

And, well trained, he set off, his arm on Declan's, at a cracking pace that did not allow the boy to protest that if there was bad news he would prefer to hear it there and then. As they made their way through the bustling streets a conviction came to him: this was something to do with Ashworth. A shiver went up his spine, as it several times had done while he was there. It was as if this moment marked the end of his youth, the dawn of adult understanding, the coming of darkness.

A
LSO BY
R
OBERT
B
ARNARD

No Place of Safety

The Habit of Widowhood

The Bad Samaritan

The Masters of the House

A Hovering of Vultures

A Fatal Attachment

A Scandal in Belgravia

A City of Strangers

Death of a Salesperson

Death and the Chaste Apprentice

At Death's Door

The Skeleton in the Grass

The Cherry Blossom Corpse

Bodies

Political Suicide

Fête Fatale

Out of the Blackout

Corpse in a Gilded Cage

School for Murder

The Case of the Missing Brontë

A Little Local Murder

Death and the Princess

Death by Sheer Torture

Death in a Cold Climate

Death of a Perfect Mother

Death of a Literary Widow

Death of a Mystery Writer

Blood Brotherhood

Death on the High C's

Death of an Old Goat

SCRIBNER

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1998 by Robert Barnard

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole of in part in any form.

SCRIBNER
and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Research USA, Inc. under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

Designed by Brooke Zimmer

Text set in Scala

Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

Barnard, Robert.

The corpse at the Haworth Tandoori/Robert Barnard.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PR6052.A665C59   1999

823'.914—dc21   98-39263

CIP

ISBN 0-7432-2427-2

ISBN 13: 978-1-4391-2580-9 (eBook)