The Case of the Missing Bronte (8 page)

The high-pitched voice went on for some time. A twinge of pity went through me for anyone forced to work under Professor Gumbold. I got myself out of the high-rise block, narrowly escaping once again being trampled underfoot by students escaping from the lecture-room. I trudged over the depressing campus, through the hangars, and the tatty blocks, past the football pitch and the tennis courts, towards my car. It had not been a very revealing interview, but when I set my mind to work, going over it, one or two interesting points emerged.

The first oddity that struck me was that Timothy Scott-Windlesham had not demanded to know why he was being questioned. Anyone would, and an academic, especially, would be likely to stand on his rights. But I had practically had to force the information on to him.

The next thing that struck me was Timothy's mention of juvenilia. This effectively demoted the manuscript to something of secondary interest — a fascinating curiosity,
valuable, but of no great literary worth. Anyone hearing of an unknown Brontë manuscript would naturally assume, perhaps, that it was juvenilia. But Timothy Scott-Windlesham had actually
seen
it, and read bits of it. The names he remembered — Mendith Crag, Lingdale Manor, Thomas Blackmore — sounded much more like the world of the mature Brontë novels than the overheated worlds of Angria and Gondal they had invented in childhood, though to be sure Yorkshire did invade the romantic-improbable nomenclature of those worlds at times.

And the third thing was the libraries. Leeds and Halifax no doubt did have excellent libraries. But Bradford was no further away, and Bradford, apparently, had a manic collector of Yorkshire literary manuscripts at its head. What was the name? Tetterfield. But that library, it seemed, Timothy had not mentioned at all. Why?

I felt I could easily get interested in Mr Tetterfield.

As I drove away from the University of Milltown, without a regretful backward glance, I felt a prickling in the spine that meant I had decided I had to see this Tetterfield. And certainly it could not be said that there were any other pressing leads that demanded to be followed up, apart perhaps from the activities, professional and unprofessional, of the Reverend Amos Macklehose. So I got out my AA map and discovered that Bradford was only thirty-five miles or so. Since Hutton-le-Dales could be taken in with only the smallest of detours, I decided to
drop in there on the way, to see if anything had turned up. It was a gorgeous spring day, and Hutton was looking idyllically peaceful when I drove through it. There was no sign of life at the cottage, but as I opened the gate a figure came round the side of the cottage, wheeling a barrow. It was a boy of thirteen or so, and he grinned cheerily at me as I came into the little garden.

‘Hello,' he said. ‘I got permission. Are you the one that's investigating the break-in?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘And you're the young man who helps in the garden.'

His hair was short and curly, and his skin was just slightly browner than it might be from a fortnight on the Algarve. Even my wife's parents (a charming couple whom you'll meet some time, I expect, though if I were you I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry) would have found it difficult to detect more than the faintest touch of the tarbrush (to use their favourite phrase) — though to do them justice, that touch would be enough: in racial matters they have all the beautiful tolerance of the British urban working-class. No doubt this touch was sufficient too to mark him off in rural Yorkshire — certainly the fact that he was ‘coloured' had been carried to the appalling Macklehoses.

‘That's me,' said the boy. ‘We've got the day off school today, and I thought I'd do a bit for Miss Wing. She'll want it looking all right when she comes out of hospital.' He must have seen a shadow pass over my face, because his forehead crinkled, and he looked up at me. ‘She will come out, won't she? She will be all right?'

‘We hope so,' I said. ‘But she hasn't regained consciousness yet.'

‘Oh golly,' he said. ‘She mustn't
die.'

‘You get on well with her?'

‘Oh yes. She's all
right.
She pays me a bit for the jobs I do in the garden. And she teaches me a bit — about plants
and that. She says I've got a gift for natural history. No one else says I've got a gift for anything. She doesn't think the school I go to's any good, doesn't Miss Wing. She says I should be a bo- botanist when I grow up.'

‘And will you?'

‘Don't know,' he said, grinning. ‘It's a while yet, isn't it?'

‘Do you know anything about the break-in?' I asked.

‘Only what the rest of the village has been saying. Wish I did know something. I'd like to get him. The first I heard about it were next morning — the other kids were talking about it on 't school bus. I got off and walked back, but the place were swarming wi' cops, and Miss Wing were in hospital. I got into hot water over that, at school.'

‘What about the day before — or the day before that? Notice anything suspicious in the village?'

‘Suspicious? Like what sort of thing?'

‘Like strangers, for example.'

‘Don't remember,' he said reluctantly, after screwing up his face with effort. ‘People drive through here, you know, and sometimes they stop at the pub. I think there may have been some religious people around about then — '

‘Religious people?'

‘Je-Jehovah's Witnesses, or summat. My Mam shut the door on them. Said we didn't want anything to do wi' that sort o' thing. She said they were foreign.'

So it presumably wasn't Mr Macklehose, or any of his flock. It didn't sound of any significance.

‘Well,' I said, ‘think about it. And keep your eyes open. Come to me or the constable here if you notice anything at all.'

‘Oh, I will,' he said, enthusiastically. ‘You've got to get the rotten bastard who did it.'

‘I will,' I said. Nothing like confidence for ensuring the
co-operation of the public.

Nothing much was stirring inside the cottage. Through in the kitchen the duty constable, PC Bradley, had seen me talking to the boy and had put on the kettle for a cup of tea.

‘Was it all right, letting him do the garden?' he asked, as we sat down at the kitchen table and I pulled out a crumby pork pie I had picked up on the way. ‘Our boys went over it very thoroughly after the break-in, and he was keen to get something done.'

‘Quite all right. What's his name?'

‘Jason Curle,' said Bradley, as if it was the most usual name in the world, which these days I suppose it is. ‘The mother's from round here. Picked up that little lot while she was working in Newcastle. Could have had an abortion — should have done, I'd say — but she decided to keep it.'

PC Bradley consigned Jason to oblivion quite unrancorously, but I can't say I shared his confident judgment as to who would have been better not to be born. I didn't pursue the matter.

‘Does he have problems here?' I asked. Bradley shrugged.

‘Nothing serious, but you know what these small places are like. People talk. Kids'll use anything if they want to be cruel. Miss Wing was very good to him, so they say. By the way, someone who said she was your wife rang.'

‘Oh?' I said suspiciously. ‘I expect it was my wife, then.'

‘Could be. Said would you ring back when you came in. Gave me this number.'

I looked at the slip of paper. It was the number of Harpenden, my family's ancestral pile, now run at a loss by the Northumberland County Council, and visited in droves by people who pretend they want to see the pictures but really want to gape at my appalling family. So Jan had gone ‘home', as she had threatened. I got up
and went to the phone in a bad temper. She must have been waiting for the call, because she answered at once.

‘Hello, Perry. So you see, I did come home.'

‘So I gather.'

‘Daniel was looking peaky, and I thought he needed a change of air.'

‘Daniel was not looking peaky when I left.'

‘I fed him Mars bars all the way up. When we got here he was looking like death.'

‘You're a monster,' I said cordially. ‘An unnatural mother — Clytemnestra, or someone of that sort.'

‘He's all right now. Romping around in the gardens with Cristobel and the baby. Well, come on — what has happened? Give me a progress report.'

It was with considerable satisfaction that I balked her.

‘I'm back at the cottage having a bite to eat with the duty constable,' I said meaningfully. Jan let out a little groan. She knows the rules. ‘Yes, well, you'll have to wait, won't you? But at least you'll be in good company.'

‘I had lunch with Aunt Kate,' said Jan.

‘Then you're justly punished for your morbid decision.'

‘Not at all,' said Jan triumphantly. ‘I took along fillet steak. All you need is a modicum of intelligent foresight, you know, Perry.'

I banged down the phone and began collecting some things together.

‘Know anything about any door-to-door religious people who were around the village last week?' I asked Bradley.

‘Someone did mention them,' he said. ‘Witnesses, or Adventists, or one of those loony sects. Foreign they were — Swedes, or Norwegians, or some such. I didn't pay much attention. They're crazy, but they're not dangerous.'

I nodded. ‘Know anything about someone called Tetterfield? A head librarian at Bradford.'

‘Librarian?' said Bradley, much as one might say Christadelphian, or Flat-Earther. I gave up. Librarians clearly did not enter into either his personal or his professional line of vision. I certainly seemed to be mingling with the non-professional criminal in this case. I left the cottage, waved to young Jason, and took off for Bradford.

Bradford is a mixture of odd nice bits, with odd nasty ones somewhat outnumbering them, and it isn't somewhere you linger, except that it's easy to get lost in a lot of hilly back streets. I expended a lot of time and patience before I located the West Riding Regional Library. It was a research library, designed to serve the whole of West Yorkshire, and it was situated some way away from the centre of the city. The building was a square, flat-faced affair, put up early in this century, and it gave the impression that there had been no lack of money going into its construction, but a considerable lack of imagination. Victorian libraries always seem to start from the assumption that reading is a very, very serious affair. To get myself in the mood for an interview with Tetterfield I got past the desk and relaxed by having a leisurely look around. The heaviness of the outside was matched by the interior. The shelves were weighty monstrosities, built to last several lifetimes, and they stretched so high as to involve masses of little stools and ladders, which stood around in the open spaces asking to be tripped over. Much of the research material consisted of leather-bound books in long series, which didn't lighten the atmosphere: the reader felt he was in a Victorian Archbishop's study, surrounded by Crockfords for the last century and a half, or volumes of the duller sort of evangelical sermon. I'd never felt like a Trollope character before. A dreadfully heavy place it was, and yet one could imagine, festering here, the madder sort of collector's passion.

As I stood browsing around the shelves, pretending to be interested in the stately brown tomes, a little man came out of a back room, and bustled fussily over to the two young ladies at the desk. He was about fifty-five or sixty, scruffily dressed in what once had been good clothes, but loaded with cocksureness and self-importance. He wagged a finger as he gave some message or other to the young ladies, and then trotted back inside, clearly pleased with himself. The young ladies were rather drear pieces of respectability, but as his door shut one of them almost imperceptibly raised both eyebrows and shoulders to the other, and then returned to the business of filing cards.

I let them get on with it for a few minutes, because they looked like the kind of young lady who likes to get on with things. Then I replaced on the shelf the volume of
Improving Addresses
by the Rev
^d
Canon Theodore Price Merrivale (privately printed in Huddersfield in 1843) and strolled over to the desk.

‘I wonder if I might speak to Mr Tetterfield?'

‘Dr Tetterfield? Oh — I'm afraid you're too late. He's just gone home.'

‘Was that him I saw here a few minutes ago?'

‘Yes. But he has his own private exit. Dr Tetterfield
always
leaves promptly at four-fifteen.'

‘Then I wonder if you could give me his home address?'

She looked at me suspiciously.

‘Are you selling anything?'

‘Do I look like a vacuum-cleaner salesman?'

‘A vacuum-cleaner salesman would find no use for his product at Dr Tetterfield's, I assure you. No, I thought you might be selling him literary material of some kind. And I can tell you, people who peddle that sort of stuff come in all shapes and sizes. And degrees of reliability.'

‘Well, I'm not that either. I'm a policeman.'

‘Oh — well, I suppose I'd better give you the address.
But I advise you: don't go around there before seven. Dr Tetterfield has his nap immediately he gets home from work. He is definitely not to be disturbed.'

‘This is police business.'

The young lady sniffed.

‘Someone who rides roughshod over the cataloguing rules is not likely to pay much attention to the law of the land. If you want anything out of him, I'd advise you to wait until he has woken up. Otherwise his response is likely to be tetchy.'

‘Why not say bloody-minded and have done with it?' drawled the other young lady, in impeccable Roedean tones.

Well, I talked with them a bit about recent bringers of literary material, but I got no joy out of that. If Miss Wing had been to see Tetterfield, she certainly hadn't done so at his place of work. Then I snuffled around the books a bit longer, getting very bored with population registers and Dictionaries of Yorkshire Worthies. Then, when the pubs opened I had a pint in a deadly little place, all varnish and stale beer, not far from the library. At five past seven I was ringing the doorbell of Dr Tetterfield's home, an imposing Victorian three-storey and basement job, set in its own half acre of ground. A man with a bit of money of his own, the people at Milltown had said. I could believe it. There was a long wait on the step, but eventually the door was opened by a massive woman in an apron, arms akimbo, eyes suspiciously peering, exuding all the charm of an East German female discus-thrower.