The Mistress of Alderley (24 page)

“The courts? Difficult to say,” said Charlie, who had been thinking of the same thing. “I imagine defense counsel will have a stab at manslaughter—rush of blood to the head, happened to have the means to hand, no malice aforethought.”

Rani looked at him, rather surprised by his tone.

“But that would be pretty much true, wouldn't it?”

Charlie shot him a glance.

“Were you convinced that he just took up the pistol with the built-in blade because it was nearest to hand? On the first night of a new production, when it had been decided a different one was the most suitable? I'm certainly not. He had it in mind. He might get away with it, of course—provided he didn't sharpen the blade beforehand.”

“I liked him. I was sorry for him.”

“So was I. But there's always a bit of ‘There but for the grace of God' in these cases, you know. Maybe even if the man you've collared is a murderous pederast. You think: ‘Thank God I wasn't given that sort of twist to my nature.' Here—this is me.”

And he got out of the car, and went in to Felicity, a sleeping Carola, a late-night drink, and a lot of talk, and all the round of love and routine domesticity.

The most immediate and frenetic reaction to Colm Fitzgerald's arrest was in the offices of Opera North. They were on the phone to agents and opera managements in Australia and South America the moment he left the theater in the company (on either side of him—it had to mean trouble) of two policemen. “Just in case,” they told the people at the other end, though they lied that he was coming down with something nasty. Desperate to find a first-rate singer for the part of Alvaro, they cursed the decision to stage the opera in English, but thought that at a pinch they might be able to go bilingual. The work continued into the next day, Sunday, and by evening they had lined up a very promising Swedish tenor who would have a stab at learning the part in English by Wednesday, when the next performance was to take place.

“He's gay as they come,” said his agent, “but it doesn't show onstage.”

“Oh, that's quite irrelevant,” said the woman at Opera North, but in her mind she noted that in the plus column.

Sheila Fleetwood was rung by the police on Monday morning and told that Colm Fitzgerald had been charged. She was in the middle of engaging a capable housekeeper to stay with her until the birth of Marius's last child, but her fleeting thought was that Marius's affairs were now at last totally out of his control. Guy was engulfed as usual in his concern for himself and he gave the matter little thought, but Helena had plans to be a writer (and she usually succeeded in getting what she wanted), and she thought that a biography of her father, with no secrets left in the closet, would be an interesting first project.

When the news made the papers, first in the
Yorkshire Post
on Monday morning, Peter Bagshaw confessed to his mother that on the night of the murder he had borrowed his girlfriend's car and driven down to Alderley, intending to ring on the doorbell, meet his father, and tell him publicly what he thought of him. When he found the house dark and deserted he had waited for an hour or so, then driven home feeling thwarted. His mother did not tell him that she had not been at home, having gone to see Les Formby, a widower down the road, with whom she had a sort of arrangement.

Marius's sister, like his wife, thought that a career of such sexual irresponsibility as “our Bert's” had deserved to end in disaster. He had been, she concluded, deeply unlovable, whatever his surface attractiveness. Then she went along to the nursing home and heard her father talk on and on about what Bert had told him on his visit earlier in the day.

Olivia, who had had a very good idea who had killed her lover-to-be, hardly thought about Colm as a person at all. She regretted the loss of a capable tenor, felt glad they had not handed the part to the understudy, who had a bleat to his voice that combined badly with the purity of her own soprano, and wondered about the Scandinavian who was coming in his place.

And Caroline, momentarily sad for “such a nice boy,” was full that Monday evening of her day in Doncaster. She had been around the Little Theatre with Philip Massery and talked to the staff. Massery had contacted all the board members, he told her, so that her appointment was now just a formality. He took her to a few possible houses in or just outside Doncaster, and to his home for a celebratory drink in the evening.

“He was the complete gentleman,” said Caroline to her younger children later that evening. “He did at one stage put his hand on my knee, but I just gave him the
tiniest
shake of the head, and he took it away. No more of that for me! I feel so happy that finally I've seen the light about myself. I'm simply
not
a person for relationships—not
that
kind of relationship anyway. It's wonderful that at last I understand myself, even if it's taken an
age
! Now, you see, I can go on from here.”

She did not see the look Alexander gave Stella, nor the look that Stella gave Alexander—both of which said: “If only, if only.”