A Murder in Mayfair (13 page)

I ended the phone call with a good feeling of a job well done and possible areas of exploration identified. I pushed to the back of my mind the obvious fact that I had alerted a first-rate journalist to the existence of a story.

P
rimrose Avenue was a cul-de-sac in one of the pleasanter parts of Southampton. The nearest busy road was a quarter of a mile away, and the stillness was only occasionally broken by the sound of a car. One had the impression that any outbreak of pop music through an open window would have brought a firm and instant response.

“Rather a nice place to grow old in,” I said to Susan, as we walked along from the wider Plymouth Road, where we had left the car.

“Which is what I suspect most of the people here are doing,” she replied.

The houses were prewar detached and semidetached ones, slightly larger than average, with neat squares of front garden sporting chrysanthemums and late roses, and doubtless good space out the back. The usual halfhearted bits of timber were stuck onto stonedash, and the windows had colored lead-lighting, usually of flowers: tulips, crocuses, and irises reared their stylized heads in the small top panes of the living rooms and in the front doors. The door of number fourteen was beginning to peel, suggesting times were harder than of yore.

The woman who came at my ring was in her sixties, and had
a sweet face lined with care. She was dressed in pale blue with a string of pearls. It occurred to me, and it was a slightly guilty feeling, that she had decided our visit justified putting on her best. But then perhaps it was an all-too-infrequent pleasure these days.

“Miss Towler?” she asked, peering at us. “Is it Mrs. or Miss?”

“It's Miss—Susan please. It's very good of you to see us, Mrs. Pinnock. This is my boyfriend Colin. He'll just sit quiet while we talk. He's only here as my driver.”

“It's very nice of him to do that. Things have changed so much since my young days. Come through, won't you?” She led the way down the hall and opened the door to the sitting room, bright and lived-in, with tea things and biscuits set out on a coffee table. “Make yourselves comfortable. Tea won't take a moment.”

We sat down and took in the room. It too spoke of things that could have been replaced, but were pressed into service for a few years more. The walls had prints of old Southampton, and a musty nineteenth-century landscape. The delicate brown of the ceiling spoke of a smoker in the house, as well as financial stringency.

“It's a bit of an event, your coming,” Mrs. Pinnock said, confirming my guess as she bustled back with a tray. “As you get older friends find getting about more difficult. And frankly some of them don't like calling when there's serious illness in the house.”

Susan looked up, also feeling guilty.

“Oh, you said your husband was ill. I didn't realize—”

“Nothing catching. And don't feel bad about coming, because it's a treat for me. My husband had a stroke three years ago, then another just as he was recovering. People find it awkward—they don't know what to say, because there's not really any hope of things getting much better. And he's a sort of
reminder: we're all going to go.” She suddenly smiled. “But I'm not going to be morbid, not today, and not with young people in the house.
That
doesn't do anyone any good. How do you like it?”

When we had got our tea as we liked it, and chosen a biscuit to nibble at, Mrs. Pinnock sat back, her duty done, and Susan poised herself over her notebook, a serious expression on her face.

“Now, let's get the basic details down. First of all your husband's name.”

“John Claydon Pinnock.”

“And yours?”

“Mabel, just plain Mabel. You don't get Mabels these days, do you? My maiden name was Marshall, and I was called for an aunt, who came good and left me a thousand pounds—that was a lot of money in those days.”

“Called for,” I put in. “You must be from the North.”

“That's right. I was born in Shipley.”

“What about your husband's parents?” Susan asked crisply, the pencil still busy making notes.

“John's the son of Wilfred Arthur Pinnock, and his wife, Victoria, née Claydon. Farther back than that I can't go. We met, by the way, John and I, soon after the war when he was doing his National Service and was stationed at Catterick.”

“What was his job after he left the Army?”

“Well, eventually he was one of the managers at the dockyard here—before things got really difficult and shipping and shipbuilding became almost a thing of the past.”

Susan circled round the subject for a bit, asking about children and grandchildren. We already had what we wanted. I had the vaguest recollections of grandparents. Only one of either side was living by the time I came into the Pinnock household, and the one I have some recollections of was my
mother's mother, who died when I was about six. But I had done some homework, and I did know that my paternal grandfather, Lionel Pinnock, had had a brother called Wilfred. In fact I remembered my father mentioning him now and then. So the John who was lying upstairs was my father's cousin, and they had lived in the same town. Eventually Susan got round to the subject.

“Now, you say your husband's father was Wilfred Pinnock. I'm going to guess that he had a brother called Lionel.”

“Oh, you have been clever!” A smile lighted up Mabel's face. It was pure pleasure that something about herself had a more general interest. “You're quite right. Uncle Lionel. He was retired by the time I married John, and living in Southsea. But we were quite friendly with his son Claud and his wife.”

“Oh yes. I think of them as the Milton Pinnocks,” said Susan brightly.

“That's where they moved to. But Claud was born and brought up here in Southampton. His wife was a secretary at the university, the English Department, and Claud was in the town planning section in the local government offices—I forget his actual title, but quite high up. They only moved because he got a better job up North.”

“He was ambitious, was he?”

She took the question as criticism.

“Oh, I wouldn't say that. But it's only natural to want to better yourself, isn't it? As I say he'd done very well down here, because he was a conscientious type of man, and very thorough. Deputy Planning Officer—that was his title, I remember now. Anyway he felt he'd gone as far as he could go down here, and he didn't like the idea of sitting around waiting for dead men's shoes.”

I was pretty sure that for the first eight or nine years of my life my father was Deputy Planning Officer for Milton, and Milton
is in no way a more prestigious or larger town than Southampton. Another piece of confirmation slipping into place.

“I'd like to hear anything more you can tell me about Claud and Elizabeth,” said Susan, pressing on. “You say you were friends with them.”

“That's right. Not exactly friends, but relatives living in the same town, and always keeping in touch. We'd drop by each other's houses now and then, go to the theater or the cinema together. Elizabeth loved a play, and I was mad about films. There were a lot of good British films around that time:
Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Two Way Stretch.
You still see them on the telly now and then.”

“I see. You went around together.”

“Yes—not regularly, but when we thought the other pair would really enjoy what was on. And we were both newly married, you see, at least when it started.”

Susan looked up from her pad.

“Oh, were you? But they would have been older, wouldn't they?”

“Several years older. They didn't marry till they were both in their thirties.” She smiled, remembering her own youth. “It was quite sweet really: they were so much in love. Not teenagers by any means, but a real Romeo and Juliet pair. Just seeing them take each other's hand when they thought no one was watching, in the theater or the cinema for example—they were a picture. But we had to be careful, John and I.”

“Careful?”

She looked a touch embarrassed.

“Well, we had Jan and Derek quite quickly after we were married. Jan was . . . a mistake, but we soon wanted another as company for her. Claud and Elizabeth hoped and hoped, but no child came. It was very important for them—being older, you see. We decided that two was enough, but any little jokes about . . . you
know, making sure we didn't have any more caused awkwardness, red faces. We knew they didn't like it. My John's not the most sensitive of men, but even he realized it. Even so I had to give him a real talking to about
not
going on about the kiddies the whole time, because it made them so sore about what they were missing.”

“So it was a real grief to them.”

“Oh, it was. A tragedy you could say. Elizabeth couldn't wait to give up her job, become a real housewife, bring up the babies. And the babies never came.”

“Still, she did eventually have one, didn't she?”

“Oh yes, they had a boy. That was after they had moved. The move may have helped. Sometimes new excitements do, so they say, and getting away from all the people who are waiting and watching and making little remarks.”

“Did you see a lot of them after they moved?”

Mrs. Pinnock stiffened.

“Hardly anything. We saw Claud at his father's funeral. He'd come down to Southsea and organized everything there. He said the little boy—Colin his name was, and of course he'll be well grown up by now—had a cold, and Elizabeth had had to stay at home to nurse him. I suppose being a late mother she was overprotective.”

“Often they are.”

“But it meant I never saw her after they moved away.”

“Oh dear. That was sad when you'd been quite close.”

“We had a card at Christmas, that was all.” There was an undertone not of resentment so much as of slight bewilderment.

“That seems odd,” commented Susan.

“I don't know about odd, but we expected more. You'd have thought they'd have written telling us how they were settling down in the North. And when Elizabeth got pregnant.”

“Maybe with such a late pregnancy that would have seemed like tempting fortune.”

“Yes, I suppose that could have been it . . .”

“But they told you when Colin was born?”

“Oh yes. That was two Christmases after they moved. Just said they'd got a lovely baby named Colin. Didn't give his birthday so we could send a card and a little something, which we'd like to have done. We were sad, to tell you the truth, John as much as me, because it was his cousin. It was as if they wanted to have the least possible contact.”

“I'm sure that wasn't so. Didn't you write yourselves?”

“A letter? Well no. We're not great writers, John and I. And it was them that moved, them that had all the news. We waited, and nothing came, so it was just cards we sent, same as them. After Elizabeth died a couple of years ago even the cards stopped.”

“I believe Claud is in a nursing home,” said Susan. The woman's sympathy was immediate.

“Oh, poor old boy. So he's got his troubles, just like John.”

“It was two Christmases after they moved when you heard about the birth of Colin, was it?” asked Susan casually.

“Oh yes. They moved in the September, and I'd have known if Elizabeth had been pregnant when she left—that pregnant, anyway.”

“I've got a note Colin must have been born some time after the move, most likely between the two Christmases. Almost certainly in 1963.”

But I wasn't. I was born—I was always told I had been born—in September 1962.

“Oh, you already knew when Claud moved, then?” said Mabel Pinnock, who was sharp as well as sweet.

“I've done a bit of work on that side of the family, though not much,” said Susan briskly. “I haven't chased up birth certificates yet.
Do you remember exactly what they said on the card about the birth of Colin?”

“Oh, it was nothing very much. Just that Elizabeth had had a boy, and that he was doing well.”

“You don't think,” said Susan carefully, “that he could have been adopted?”

“Adopted!”

“That would make a difference genealogically,” she hurried to explain. “To the family tree. We'd note that he wasn't of the bloodline.”

“But . . . but Elizabeth was late having him, but still of child-bearing age,” said Mrs. Pinnock, having trouble coping with a new idea. “About forty-two, I'd guess. It had never occurred to me . . .”

“But it's a possibility?”

A thought struck her.

“No. No, I don't think it is. You see, they'd already been rejected as candidates to adopt. It was partly their age, partly because Claud had a mild form of epilepsy. That was one of the things that wasn't talked about between us, but it went around the family—the talk, I mean.”

“Ah, so definitely their son,” said Susan, in neutral tones, and making a note in her pad.

We had really got all we could expect, and all we had come for. The rest was top-dressing for Mabel Pinnock's benefit, and we went into that gladly, asking questions about Southampton in the fifties and early sixties, her husband's job in the dockyards, and often getting back to her grandchildren, two of whom still lived in the area and were obviously the light of her life, which otherwise centered itself on the sickroom upstairs.

“I'd ask you up to say hello to John,” she said apologetically, as we got up to leave, “but to tell you the truth it's more of a
trial and an embarrassment to him than a pleasure. He was such a strong man, you know, and such a jolly one, and knowing he's reduced to this—well, it upsets him.”

“You should get an interest for yourself,” I said, for a moment donning my ministerial hat. “Do a course or something—maybe start one of the Open University units you could do entirely from home.”