Recalled to Life (8 page)

'Tallantire moved up to the second floor. Here, directly above the guests on the first floor, the children and their nannies were housed, while to the rear of the house the Gilchrists, butler and housekeeper, had their flat.

'Cissy Kohler was unable to help. Indeed she was in a state of such agitation that she was hardly able to speak without tears starting to her eyes, a condition attributed by most to her closeness to the bereaved twins. By contrast, Miss Marsh was her usual calm self. Her nose was badly bruised and when Tallantire opened the interview by commenting upon it, she explained that something had woken her in the night, a noise, and thinking it might be one of the children, she had jumped out of bed in the dark. Unfortunately in her newly awoken state she had forgotten she wasn't in her room at Haysgarth, the Partridge family home, and walked straight into a wardrobe. As her room was almost directly over the gunroom, the time and nature of this noise became important. All she could say was that it was a single, not a continuous or repeated sound, it hadn't originated so far as she could ascertain from the children, and it was not long before the midnight chimes sounded.

'The Gilchrists had heard nothing and the butler made it clear that in his opinion things had been better arranged in the old days when no policeman under the rank of Chief Constable would have been allowed in the Hall through the front door.

'The other live-in servants, Mrs Partington, the cook, and Jenny Jones and Elsbeth Lowrie, the two maids, all of whom had their quarters on the top floor, were less superior but just as helpful. Jones, a well-starched angular girl, contrived to give the impression that she knew more than she was going to tell, but Tallantire was inclined to put this down to a kind of asexual teasing to make herself interesting.

'All this had eaten deep into Sunday. One can imagine the damage-limitation efforts that were going on along the Westminster-Buckingham Palace axis. So far the media had been kept completely in the dark. The Sunday papers were of course full of Stephen Ward's death and didn't miss this chance to rehash the whole sorry story and its attendant rumours. The most sensational of these related to the identities of what had come to be known as The Man in the Mask and The Man with No Head. The former was a figure who, naked except for a leather mask, acted as a waiter at pre-orgiastic banquets and invited guests to punish him if his service didn't come up to scratch. The latter referred to a photograph of a naked man from which the head had been deleted. Along with most of his colleagues, Thomas Partridge had been posited by the gutter press as a candidate for both roles, and he was very keen to distance himself from this new scandal as soon as possible. So when the police returned on Monday morning, the Partridge family were all packed up and ready to leave.

'That would not be possible, Tallantire told him. Not until he had interviewed the children.

'Partridge exploded. He was a formidable man when roused and his dressing-down of Tallantire was audible all over the Hall. But Tallantire was adamant. He, we now know, had been ordered to wrap this affair up before the Bank Holiday was over, and he wasn't going to let it go till he was sure he'd covered every possible angle.

'The row was at its height with the outcome still in doubt when one of Tallantire's minions appeared and whispered something in his master's ear that made the Superintendent leave the room with the scantiest of apologies.

'His gut feeling that there was more here than met the eye had made Tallantire grasp at straws. Interviewing the children was one of these. Jenny Jones was another. Just in case there was more to her knowingness than the desire of drabness to be colourful, he had sent his most personable young officer to talk to her again.

'He had struck gold. Resentment, envy, moral outrage, or just a desire to please, had made Jones reveal that her fellow maid, Elsbeth Lowrie, had had one of the guests in her room that night. Nor was this the first time such a thing had happened, and it wasn't right that she, Jenny, had to do the brunt of the work while Elsbeth was in Mickledore's employ simply because she was no better than she ought to be.

'Elsbeth, a shapely blonde girl who looked like every wicked squire's vision of a healthy young milkmaid, had seen no reason to tell the police the truth on Sunday, but she saw even less to keep on lying today. She freely admitted that from time to time she entertained some of Mickledore's guests, but only those she fancied, and not for money, that wouldn't be right, though she did acknowledge that her pay packet often contained what she ingenuously described as "a kind of Christmas bonus", a phrase which won her the caption
A Christmas Cracker
in some tabloid photographs.

'Her guest on Saturday night had been none other than the Right Honourable Thomas Partridge, MP. He had come to her just before midnight (that clock again) and left possibly an hour later, she couldn't be certain.

'Like a good politician, Partridge did not deny the undeniable, apologized sweetly for his recent ill temper, and offered full cooperation of himself and his family in return for the exercise of maximum discretion.

'Tallantire like a good Yorkshireman said nowt, and instructed his officers to start interviewing the children.

'We, as you may imagine, were fascinated by all these comings and goings. My sister Wendy and I had formed a close alliance with the two elder Partridge girls. Their brother, Tommy, newly entangled in the weeds of pubescence, regarded us scornfully as noisy kids, and the other children were of course not yet of an age to enjoy the delights of midnight feasts and doctors-and-nurses. But four children between seven and nine is the nucleus of an intelligence service far more efficient than MI5 and there was little that we missed, though much we couldn't understand.

'We four were interviewed by a male detective with a WPC by his side. She, I think, would have preferred to see us one at a time but he was the better psychologist and knew you were likely to get much more out of a relaxed and mutually disputatious group. Also the fact that there were four of us made it easier for him to shut our mothers out, though I doubt if he'd get away with that nowadays.

'I can't remember his name, but his face remains clear, broad and hard, with eyes like rifle sights and a mouth like Moby Dick's. But when he spoke it was very gently. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes, reached them towards me and said, "Smoke?" and I was his forever. I wanted to take one but didn't quite dare and he said, "Later, mebbe. I always fancy a bull's-eye myself this time in the morning." And he took out a huge bag of bull's-eyes and passed these round instead.

'After that we were old friends. The girls clearly thought he was wonderful, but it was me he spoke to mainly, very man to man, always glancing at me to confirm anything they said. It was easy to tell him that we hadn't been sleeping as we should have been, but instead had gathered in the room Wendy and I shared for a midnight feast. "And did you hear or see owt?" he asked. By this time I'd have gladly made something up to please him, but as it turned out, the truth was enough. Yes, we'd heard a noise and I'd peeped out through the door, fearing that one of the two nannies was on to us, and at first I thought that my fears were right for I saw Cecily Kohler hurrying down the corridor towards me, but she went right past, presumably to her own room, for I heard a door open and shut. Which end of the corridor was she coming from? he wanted to know. The end where the side stairway was, I told him. And how did she look? "Sort of pale and seasick," I remember saying. "Oh, and she had blood on her hands."

'I tossed that in almost casually. To an eight-year-old, all adult behaviour is in a sense incomprehensible. What are we to make of people who have the power to do
anything,
yet who spend so little time eating ice-cream and going on the Big Dipper? Also nannies were, in our privileged echelon of society, the great clearer-uppers. You wet your bed, you brought up your supper, you grazed your knee, nanny would sort it out. Even I knew this, though presently nannyless because of my father's constitutional inability to keep servants.

'So a bloodstained nanny was not necessarily remarkable.

'None of the girls had seen her - they'd been cowering out of sight. But I stuck to my story and when they went to Cecily Kohler's room they found confirmation of it in traces of blood in her washbasin and on a towel, blood which was of the same group as Pamela Westropp's.

'But of Kohler herself and her young charges, there was no sign.

'You should recall that this was still not a murder inquiry. The room had been locked and there was plenty of evidence to support suicide. But up till now, if there had been a crime, no one had an alibi except for Partridge and Mickledore; and now with Elsbeth's testimony that had vanished also. One has the feeling that Tallantire, like some intuitive scientist, had made a mighty leap forward to his results and was now faced with the tedious task of filling in the necessary logical process between.

'The Superintendent delayed talking to Mickledore till the interviews with the children were done. Then he bluntly accused Sir Ralph of acting as Partridge's pimp, a word I had to look up later in the big dictionary. Mickledore smiled and said that in civilized circles, people were mature enough to make their own decisions and he had merely acted out of loyalty to a friend, a concept he did not expect a policeman to be familiar with.

'Tallantire asked him how he spent this time of loyalty while his friend was copulating with the servants (the big dictionary really got some use that day!) and Mickledore replied that he had gone to the library, fetched a book and sat and read in the billiard room till Partridge reappeared.

'It was in the library that Tallantire had established his unofficial HQ, which is why I can be so precise about this and other conversations. The deep-bayed windows with the full-length velvet curtains provided an ideal hiding- place for an inquisitive child, though at this remove I can no longer be sure what I heard then and what I have learned subsequently, but in a short space that Monday morning there were several phone calls, which produced a variety of reaction in Tallantire from anger to exultation. Presumably among them were the two technical reports which were so fiercely contested during the trial. In the opinion of one pathologist, the path of the wound was slightly downwards, not, as would be expected from such a form of suicide, horizontal or slightly upward. And experiments at the police lab suggested that after the first barrel was fired, the shock to the victim plus the gun's recoil would make it unlikely that enough pressure could be maintained to fire the second.

'Now at last Tallantire had cause beyond gut-feeling to treat this as a murder inquiry.

'"I want Kohler!" he snarled at the hard-faced man. "Why the hell is it taking so long to find her?"

'They left the library. Fearful of missing something, Wendy and I followed. Outside we could see policemen everywhere. Tallantire started to talk to a uniformed inspector while our friend with the bull's-eyes walked out to the end of the rickety old jetty projecting into the lake. He seemed to be staring out at the little island in the middle of the water. It was covered with willows whose trailing branches formed a natural screen around its banks. Cissy Kohler had called it Treasure Island and we had enjoyed a marvellous game out there with her on Saturday while Miss Marsh had sat in a chair on the lawn and looked after the younger kids.

'Now I walked a little way along the jetty and stared out towards the island too. I saw it first. Under the screen of willows was the shallow crescent of a canoe. I hurried forward eager to gain kudos from my new friend, but he must have spotted it himself.

'He put his hands to his mouth to form a megaphone and in the loudest voice I ever heard issue from human lips he bellowed, "MISS KOHLER!"

'At that cry every bird within half a mile seemed to rise squawking into the air. Then just as quickly everything went still. All the human figures round the margin of the lake froze. Even the very wind in the trees died away. And slowly, as if summoned by the call rather than propelled by human hand, the prow of the canoe swung out from under the willows. We could see quite clearly the outline of the woman though the children were not visible.

'Then the hard-faced man shouted again.

'"Come in! Your time is up!"

'I began to laugh because that was what the man called at the boating pond in the park near where we lived. But what happened next wasn't funny, though no two witnesses seemed to see the same thing. Some said Cissy Kohler tried to swing back under the willows. Others said she drove the paddle into the water in an effort at flight to the further bank. Still others claimed that she deliberately flipped the canoe over as if opting for death by water rather than the risk of it by rope. To my young eyes she just seemed to get entangled in the trailing branches, then capsized.

'The man at the end of the jetty let out a very rude word my mother would not let me say, kicked off his shoes, hurled himself into the water, and headed out to the island at a tremendous crawl. Out by the canoe we could see only one head, Kohler's. Then it vanished as she dived. Up she came with something in her arms. She tried to right the canoe with one hand but couldn't manage it, and when the policeman reached her, he found her clinging to the hull with what turned out to be the child, Philip, in her arms. Now the policeman dived and dived, while his colleagues ran to the boathouse and launched the other canoe and an old duck punt. By the time they got to the island, he'd brought up the little girl, Emily. But it was too late.