The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (2 page)

“Why did you go to it, then?”

“To get me anorak. Some nights are nice an' warm still, but tonight's chilly. Bash drops me off on the Thornton Road, and I have ten minutes' walk from there.”

Oddie nodded.

“I see. Go on.”

“Well, I opened the boot, in the dark, and I felt in and—oh, God!—felt this body. Couldn't believe it, but there was still a bit of light from the kitchens and—well, I knew that's what it were. I ran to the back door, shoutin', and Mr. Masud opened up and called the police.”

“I suppose you got no look at the man's face?”

“No—didn't even know it was a man.”

“You've got no quarrel with any young man? Anyone been making trouble here at the Tandoori? Any other reason why a body should be dumped in your car?”

“I got no quarrel with nobody, except my mother-in-law, who's a pain.”

“Well, we'll have to ask you to look at him when he's been removed from the boot, maybe tomorrow.” Taz nodded unenthusiastically. “Just one last question: did you talk about your car with Bash or Mr. Masud in front of people who were eating here? Maybe said it was broken down and so on?”

Taz thought hard.

“Bash knew it was broken down because he gave me a lift the night I couldn't start it and every night since. I probably told Mr. Masud the next day before we opened. I could have said somethin' to Bash in front of the punters—like maybe I was goin' to get someone from me garage at
Thornton to ‘ave a look at it on Saturday. . . . I'll 'ave to put 'im off now, won' I?”

“You will. Could you have said this in English, or—”

“Urdu. Could be either. We go from one to the other, Bash and me—don' know what we been talking 'alf the time. With Mr. Masud we mostly talk Urdu.”

That was all they could get out of him that evening. He went off to accept, finally, Bash's lift home with perceptible relief on his face. The next day they took all three from the Tandoori to the mortuary at Keighley Police headquarters. They watched Taz's reaction in particular when he saw the face, which was still a horrible sight. He shook his head, first with pity. But he looked as closely as he could bear, then when he had looked away he shook it again as a negation.

“I've never seen 'im. He's never eaten with us while I was on.”

He had a sharp, waiter's eye for customers, Charlie guessed. Assuming he was not personally involved, he believed him when he said the dead boy hadn't been a customer. His negative was confirmed by the other two men from the restaurant.

When they had gone Charlie talked to the young pathologist who would be doing the autopsy.

“Strangled, without a doubt. A nasty, slow death, as you can see from the face. There are signs that the hands had been secured, perhaps behind his back. It would be difficult to do it any other way, unless he was drunk or sedated. Will you be wanting some kind of artist's impression made?”

“Yes, I will,” said Oddie. “It's the best hope we have of getting a lead on him at the moment. We can hardly show people a photograph of his face like
that
.”

Charlie turned away from the body. Once again he had the sinking feeling that sometime in the next few days he would be seeing a lot of the daunting gradient that was Haworth Main Street.

 • • • 

Charlie parked his car in the Old Hall car park and went out onto the road. He was at the crossroads halfway up the hill. He had chosen to park here rather than at the top because he was the sort of person who liked to get the slog over first—in food terms a vegetables-first person rather than a meat-first one. So it was uphill to start with, calling at all the little tourist-oriented shops and galleries and cafés, then maybe he could give Main Street a miss on the way down and take the gentler road back to the Old Hall, passing the school and the park. Coming down Main Street, he knew, with its cobbled steepness, would be almost as grueling as walking up it.

The artist had done his best, but over the next quarter of an hour Charlie began to get the idea that his best was not good enough. It was the tail end of summer, and tourist trapping was on the wane, but though the proprietors and assistants were polite and had time to give him, the picture aroused no memories in anyone.

“If he was here in the school holiday period, there's Buckley's chance of his being noticed, unless he did something to make himself conspicuous, like buying something,” said one disillusioned man in an art shop stuffed full of representations of Top Withens and sheep-populated moorlands. “You must know how chock-full of gawpers this place is then.”

“He could have been here in the last few days,” Charlie said.

“Oh, well, in that case, no, I haven't seen him, and he didn't come in here. Now you've got time, you notice.”

That was the burden of practically all the interviews he had, as he went methodically upward, calling at establishments on both sides of the street. He concluded that the boy could have gone up or down Main Street (practically everyone except the halt and the lame did that), but that he didn't stop anywhere, perhaps because he had no money to spend, perhaps because he was not the type the trappers were aiming to catch.

There was, though, one flicker that could have been of recognition. Charlie had decided early on that the cafés were a better bet than the shops, because the shops sold nothing that a human being could actually
need
, but the cafés did. It was in a café called Tabby's Kitchen that the proprietress blinked and considered long, before disappointingly shaking her head.

“No, it wouldn't be right to say I recognized him,” she said, handing the picture back. “Just a vague memory that someone a bit like that was in here. But it would probably send you off on entirely the wrong track. After all, this picture's . . . well, not very
individual
, is it?”

“Not very,” admitted Charlie. “We may be able to get a better one later on. What can you remember about this boy?”

“Not much. Not English, I seem to remember.”

“Foreign? European?”

“No, I mean not
English
. Scottish, Welsh, Irish—I associate him with an accent.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Oh, weeks. But I don't want you to think I'm talking about this boy here. That way you could go wrong. It's just a remote possibility.”

“Will you think about it? Try to remember anything about him?”

“That never works with me. But if I don't try, things sometimes come to me. If anything does I'll be in touch.”

Charlie had to be content with that.

It took him two and a half hours to get to the top of the hill, and do the clutch of establishments around the church. Not a café, shop, or pub admitted knowing him. He stood in thought: was it time to take the downward road and do the few businesses on the lower half of the hill, and then the station? The steam railway was a definite possibility: it was still running on weekends, and the boy could have come on it to Haworth from Keighley.

Then he remembered, with a guilty start, that there was still the parsonage. In the past the Brontës were what brought people to Haworth, though nowadays they often seemed to function merely as an excuse for purchasing a tea towel. But when he made his way along the path beside the church, then up the cobbles of Church Lane, he found the museum still presented in early autumn a busy enough front to the world—old people, young people, Japanese visitors, that cross section of the footloose and the driven that constitutes Britain's tourist trade.

A quick survey told him that the shop was the place to go. You came through the shop at the end of your tour of the Parsonage Museum, but you could also go into it without doing the tour at all. He saw souvenir hunters doing just that, emerging with postcards, mugs, and copies of
Wuthering Heights
with special stickers on them. He pulled open the door and went in.

The shop was moderately busy, and a dark woman with large eyes was taking money behind the counter. As he paused, watching, listening to the voice on the educational video that was playing, an older woman with fair hair and a worried expression on her face hurried past.

“I've just heard from Grasmere there's a French school party on the way,” she whispered to her assistant. “
What
a pity we can't nail everything down!”

The light-fingeredness of French school parties was legendary in police circles as well. Charlie went forward to get his inquiries out of the way before they arrived. He flashed his ID at the younger woman, then reached into his inside pocket and pulled out the by now dog-eared artist's impression.

“I wondered if you'd seen this young man,” he said. “Not necessarily recently, maybe sometime over the summer.”

She took it hesitantly, with the familiar uncertainty of all the other people he'd talked to that day, people who saw a great deal, perhaps too much, of transient tourist trade. She frowned over it for a moment or two.

“Mary!” she called, and the other woman came over. “He wants to know if we've seen this man.”

Mary looked at it, then they glanced at each other.

“It could be,” she said. “But I wouldn't want to be certain or get him into trouble.”

“You won't,” said Charlie, refraining from adding that he'd already been in all the trouble he could ever get into. “You are both speaking of the same young man?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mary confidently, and the two women
gave glances at each other of perfect sympathy and understanding. “You're thinking of the singer, aren't you, Steph?”

Stephanie nodded.

“Singer?” Charlie asked.

“A young man who was singing for money, just outside here, at the top of the path that leads down to the car park. There's quite a lot of singers come to Haworth in the summer. This one had rather a nice voice, didn't he, Steph? A real tenor. He sang light stuff—folk songs, Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘O Sole Mio,' that kind of thing. He had a guitar, but the accompaniments were a bit rudimentary.”

“How long ago was this?”

They looked at each other again.

“It was the height of the season,” said Stephanie. “There were lots of people milling around. But the height of the season is all the school holidays—”

“I'd say anything from four to eight weeks ago,” said Mary. “But that's a guess, nothing more.”

“Was he just here the once?”

“Oh, yes. Come to think of it, that's a bit unusual. They usually come back.”

“And how long was he here?”

“About an hour,” Mary said, surprisingly definite. “He was perfectly pleasant, as a singer, but some of the visitors inside the museum don't like it, find it distracting, so we generally ask them to move on after a time. Not that we've any right to do that, but they generally go.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“He didn't talk,” Stephanie remembered. “Mary went out the door, and he'd obviously seen her behind the counter. He just raised a hand to her, grinned, and began packing away his guitar.”

“So you had no idea, for example, what nationality he was?”

“No,” said Mary, shaking her head. “But English-speaking, I would guess; wouldn't you, Steph?”

“Oh, yes. He put on an Irish accent for the Irish songs, and a Scottish one for the Scottish songs—not an awfully good one. He sang the Italian songs in Italian, but I'd say definitely English-speaking. His clothes weren't what you'd expect, sort of old-fashioned.”

“Oh? What exactly was he wearing?”

“A tweed jacket, and flannels. He took off the jacket when it got hot. He had a white shirt on. It's not really what young people wear these days.”

“No. . . . Is there anything else you can tell me?”

They shook their heads.

“I don't think so, do you, Steph?”

“No.”

“Did you notice where he went?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mary. “He went through the car park and down the steps beside the Weavers' restaurant.”

“So he'd then be close to the Old White Lion and the tourist office and the post office?”

“That's right. But I didn't see if he turned in that direction.”

“They have cards advertising jobs in the post office,” said Stephanie.

As he passed the Old White Lion, with the King's Arms on his right and the Black Bull straight ahead, Charlie was very conscious that he could do with a pint. No such luck. He turned aside reluctantly from his plethora of choices. The window of the post office did indeed, down in one corner, have a board on which small advertisements and notices were pinned. He bent down to scan them. There were advertisements for bed-and-breakfast establishments (“Totally smoke-free zone”), for missing pets (“brindled and white, with damaged left ear and bleary right eye”),
and, yes, jobs. Only one, though, and it looked as if it had been left up by mistake: one of the cafés, Tabby's Kitchen, was advertising for waitresses during the holiday period. Nothing more. Obviously late September was not the time when Haworth was recruiting casual staff.

Charlie straightened himself, changed focus, and gazed through the window. He had popped in with his picture while he was doing the top of the village, but neither of the women behind the counter had recognized it. There was a woman there now, but a new one: she was a large young woman, firm of manner, and, if Charlie judged aright, capable. He decided it was worth trying again. The afternoon was passing its peak, and there were only one or two loiterers around, gossiping after buying the odd stamp or collecting their pensions. He flashed his ID, and the little post office miraculously emptied itself.

When he showed the woman his picture she seemed, like most of the Haworth people he had shown it to, to be unimpressed.