A Fall from Grace (17 page)

“Know where Carmel Postgate lives?”

“Up Brigg Street. It'll be about number eighteen or twenty. Father works in the council offices.”

“Right. Thank you very much. I'd like you to keep quiet about this. I don't want it to get around for a bit.”

“It'll cost you.”

Charlie sighed, pulled out his wallet and handed over a fiver.

* * *

It was some way into the afternoon, when he was deep in the paperwork connected to the shooting of the police sergeant and the charge against his assailant, that Charlie got an idea. Politicians were then, as
always, proclaiming how they would reduce paperwork for the police while they were at the same time bringing in new regulations that would increase it further. The only thing that Charlie would say in favor of the mountain of forms he was compelled to produce was that most of them could be filled in with only half a mind.

When the idea occurred to him he grabbed the phone.

“Felicity? I want you to do something.”

“Something to do with Dad's death?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Tone of voice. You wouldn't use that tone or those words if you just wanted me to go down to the supermarket for a bottle of whiskey. Anyway, you always get that tone when you're on a murder case.”

“Don't use that word. Nobody's sure, not even me.”

“But the others think the balance of probability is to natural causes, and you think the balance is toward unnatural causes.”

“Maybe. Shut up. I'm supposed to be working. There's a girl called Carmel Postgate, lives up Brigg Street, maybe number eighteen or twenty. They'll probably be in the directory.”

“You say ‘girl.' I presume you mean one of the younger children in Anne Michaels's gang?”

“Yes. Very bubbly and talkative.”

“Sounds useful.”

“But don't bank on it. A lot of talk about the murder has probably gone around the school, so she might be a bit reserved. There's the parents too. Many of them
must have seen
Unman, Whosit and Whatsit,
and if connections are being made at school they very likely will be made at home too. So Carmel's parents may be protective too.”

“All right, all right. You don't have to mollycoddle me. I take it you want me to go round and talk to her and find out if the gang ever targeted my dad, and if so what happened when they went up to sing songs at him.”

“Exactly.”

“Anything else?”

“Just anything your novelist's antennae can pick up about the dynamics of the gang, or about its leader.”

“It shall be done. I'll enjoy doing it.”

Gaining admittance to the Postgate home was easier than Felicity expected. Even before her father's death their arrival in the village had been generally noticed—Charlie's color, the fact that he was an inspector, Felicity's own ambitions to be a novelist “like her father” (the phrase, commonly used, would have driven Felicity wild if she had heard it) meant that they were a marked family. She was therefore invited in; Carola was sent to play in a back room with Carmel's preschool-age brother so they could settle down in the sitting room.

“It's my father,” said Felicity. “I'm still trying to come to terms with his death, you see.”

“It must be awful when it's so sudden.”

“It is. Much more difficult to make sense of. You must be wondering what it has to do with you.”

“Well . . . not altogether. But go on.”

“It's really your daughter Carmel I wanted to talk to.”

An expression of aggravation crossed Carmel's mother's face.

“I thought as much! She'll be home any time now.” She leaned forward confidingly. “She's clammed up every time your dad's death has been mentioned, and Jim and I have been convinced there's been something up—something connected with that Anne Michaels, we feel sure. She's such a bossy little madam, and we're sure she's been leading the younger ones astray. What's a girl of her age doing, spending so much time with kids three or four years younger than herself?”

There was a sound of a key in the front door, and someone entering. There had for some time been a degree of noise and childish laughter from the back room, suggesting that Carola and the young Postgate were getting on fine. Soon there came a child's voice raised: “Mummy, who's this black kid Dicky's playing with?”

A face peered round the door, and its jaw dropped.

“Don't be so rude, Carmel,” said Mrs. Postgate, red with embarrassment. “This is Mrs. Peace, whose father died—you know, Mr. Coggenhoe. She'd like to have a talk with you.”

The supposedly talkative girl clammed up at once, an obstinate expression settling on her face. “I don't want to talk to her.”

“Oh yes, you will, my girl,” said her mother, no mean exponent of the obstinate expression herself. “You'll tell her exactly what she wants to know.”

The girl came in, dragging her feet, and went to sit on the sofa under the window, as far as possible from Felicity.

“I don't know anything,” she muttered.

“You don't know anything about what?” Felicity asked sweetly.

“Nothing.”

It looked like being a long haul unless Felicity came straight to the point, so that's what she did.

“I suppose you mean you don't know anything about this little . . . group that Anne Michaels has got together from children in the drama stream, don't you?”

After a long pause Carmel nodded.

“Now, I'm not going to get you into trouble, or to blame you in any way. I just want to know about the last weeks of my father's life. Do you understand?” Another nod. “Now, this little group has been going round to newcomers in the village, singing outside their houses, shouting through their letter boxes and so on, haven't they? Haven't
you
?”

“We didn't mean no harm. It was just fun.”

“Not much fun for the Nortons, I'm told, nor for anyone else you've targeted. But like I say, I'm not here to blame. Newcomers are a bit of a soft target, I suppose. You never got on to us, though.”

“Your husband's a policeman. Otherwise Anne says we would've.”

“I can imagine. But instead of us you picked on my dad.”

Again a pause, and then a nod.

“Now, you went up there one evening, about a week ago, didn't you?”

By now the obstinate expression had softened.

“Yes . . . We all knew who he was. People pointed him out.”

“They did, I know. Then you all gathered outside his bungalow, didn't you, in the dark?”

Carmel suddenly became almost voluble, caught up in the excitement.

“That was the part we liked. It was wonderful. Like we were just dark shapes if he looked out the window, just inside his gate.”

“And you sang the song from
The Tempest,
didn't you?”

“Yes. That's just right—really nasty-sounding, though none of us really knows what it means. It's ever such an old play. Then we sang the song that Anne made up to the tune of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.' It starts: ‘Go back where you came from.' ”

“Charming. What happened next?”

“There was a light came on in the hall, and there was this shape coming toward the door.”

“What did you do?”

“Ran out the gate and scattered. That's what Anne had told us to do, and what we'd always done. Then even if they realize it was children outside they can't iden . . . i-den-ti-fy which children. So we waited, all separate, down or up the street. The door opened. But it was different to the usual, and we heard voices, and then we realized that Anne hadn't run away.”

“No. She stayed there and talked to my father, didn't she?”

“Yes. And then the door shut, and Anne still didn't come out. So we all went home, because it was nearly nine o'clock. But we were worried in case he'd done something horrible to her. He hadn't though. She turned up at school the next day, so it was all right.”

“What did she say happened?”

Carmel by now was well into her narrative stride.

“Wouldn't say. Said the silly old git . . . sorry—the old man thought we were carol singers. Pretty funny carol, ‘'Ban, 'ban, Ca-Caliban.' ”

“My father was tone deaf,” said Felicity.

“What does that mean?”

“That you can't tell one tune from another. Just like some people are word blind—they can't manage words, and others can't manage numbers. Music just meant nothing to my dad.”

“I can't do arithmetic, or hardly,” said Carmel.

“There you are, you see. So my dad got it wrong and thought you were only on a friendly visit to sing carols. So did you ever hear what happened after Anne went inside?”

“No. She just said we wouldn't be going there again.”

“What did you think happened?”

“Some of us thought they went to bed together, but I didn't, not with an old man like he was. I think they just liked each other, because they were talking together at the carol service.”

“That's quite likely.”

“Anyway, I expect Anne got
something out of it.”

“Something out of it? What sort of thing?”

But though she wheeled and threatened, Felicity never got a straight answer as to what Anne got out of her encounters. After a time she just said, “I must take my black child home,” and left.

That evening Charlie came off duty at eight, and drove home for a late steak and chips, followed by an account from Felicity of her conversation with Carmel Postgate and her mother. He was slumped out on the sofa and looking forward to coffee (wondering, at the same time, whether it was too early to go to bed), when the doorbell rang.

“Must be Chris,” he shouted to Felicity in the kitchen. “Who else would call so late?”

But when he went to open the front door he found it was a couple of whom he had no memory.

“Mr. Peace?” began the man. “You don't know me but you—”

“Mr—ah!—Norton. Mr. Norton from the Hatton Homes estate.”

“You recognized the voice. I can tell you're a policeman. Mr. Peace, I don't want to intrude, because I know you and your wife have suffered a bereavement—”

“No, no. Come in,” said Charlie, standing aside. “I'd be interested to hear how things have gone since we talked. Here is my wife. Felicity, this is the Nortons.”

He ushered them in, sat them down on the sofa, and Felicity went to the kitchen to fetch coffee, taking care to leave both doors open. They were an appealing-looking pair—pleasant rather than distinguished in any way. In their early sixties, Charlie guessed, and now much more confident and relaxed than when he had spoken to Mr. Norton on the phone. He and his wife were both looking around them, interested in the house, and hardly at all tensed up.

“I'd make a guess and say you've come through the business with the children and it's now all quiet on the Norton front—am I right?” said Charlie.

The Nortons both grinned.

“Well, that's about right. I'm Richard, by the way, and the wife's Carol. Yes, we have come through.”

“Good. I'd be interested to hear how.”

“That's partly why we're here—to tell you. The truth is, you see, that we're getting about in Slepton Edge a lot more now, talking to people in shops, going to the pub now and then, and what people are talking about at the moment is the death of your—father-in-law, was it?”

“That's right. Felicity's father.”

“We were very sorry to hear about it, because we're so grateful for what you did for us.”

“I did nothing that did any good,” said Charlie. “The story of quite a lot of a policeman's life. But I did try.”

“The truth is that people are gossiping rather than
just talking. You know how gossip always magnifies everything, and links up all sorts of things that aren't connected. Well, people were talking in the pub at lunchtime, and they were linking up the death of Mr. Coggenhoe—my wife has read some of his books, enjoyed them very much—linking his death up with the drama stream at Westowram High. Is that right?”

“I believe so,” said Charlie cautiously. “Not that there's anything in it, necessarily. They're talking because a radio play that the drama kids did in class and then gave a public performance of had in it a man pushed over a cliff.”

“Doesn't seem much of a connection.”

“Pushed over by the boys in his class.”

“Even so . . . But I'm not a literary type, and not a detective either.”

“If you had asked us a couple of weeks ago,” put in Carol Norton, “we'd probably have said that we wouldn't put anything past that nasty little gang. Things are a bit different now.”

“So I gather,” said Charlie. “Tell me what happened.”