Wycliffe in Paul's Court

by W.J. Burley

Genres: Mystery; Cozy Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Paul’s Court is a quiet corner in the heart of the city, an oasis of peace and safety—until the night when there are two violent deaths. Willy Goppel, a German émigré, is found hanging in his home; and fifteen-year-old Yvette Cole, who may or may not have lived up to her wild reputation, is discovered strangled and thrown half naked over the churchyard hedge. Chief Superintendent Wycliffe has the aid of a shrewd Sergeant Kersey, but they still find this a difficult case to crack. As Wycliffe and Kersey dig deeper, they gradually untangle a complex network of secrets in the quiet of Paul’s Court.

Release date: November 1, 2002

Publisher: Orion Publishing

Print pages: 192

Sample

Nobody in Falcon Street asked themselves where Willy Goppel had come from or how it was that the Dolls’ House Shop had become as much a part of the street as St Olave’s Church or the Old Mansion House or the market which closed the street to vehicles every Saturday. Willy Goppel had established himself as an institution, accepted uncritically. He spoke precise English with a German accent for, like the Bayreuth Festival, the Passion Play, Mad King Ludwig and the Nazi Party, Willy was Bavarian born. Many people in the street remembered his English wife but she had died years ago leaving him with a six-year-old son and some house property scattered about the city. His son Frederick, now a man, had left home though he still visited his father when he needed money. The property had grown too, both in value and extent, and though few people realized it, Willy was a wealthy man.

Willy lived over his shop in part of an old house of which the other, larger part, was occupied by the Wards who ran a sub post office and sold stationery, sweets and tobacco. A broad archway sliced through the ground floor of the house giving access to three modern dwellings built round a courtyard which had a splendid oak tree in the middle. A century before, the Paul family, carriers in a fair way of business, had lived in the house and kept their horses and waggons in appropriate buildings round the courtyard; now, the carrier business forgotten, those buildings had been replaced by three rather pleasant houses, secluded, not far from the city centre, and known as Paul’s Court.

It had been another day of the September heatwave and in the cool of the evening Willy was out in his railed-off backyard, weeding and watering his sink gardens. He had started with one, now he had six, each laid out in an accepted style of landscape gardening with carefully chosen plants which, as far as possible, maintained the scale. On a patch of grass, protected by chicken-wire, Willy’s guinea-pigs were getting their daily ration of the out-of-doors and at a little distance his marmalade cat sprawled in the sunshine, biting its paws.

The oak tree spread its green canopy over the middle of the courtyard and above a little red sports-car parked beneath it. The car belonged to Natalie Cole. Natalie lived with her fifteen-year-old daughter and Geoff Bishop in the house on the right-hand side of the Court. The other residents rather ostentatiously put their cars in the garages provided but such hints were lost on Natalie. Willy had only to raise his head from his sink gardens to see her through the wide open window of her living-room. She was seated at the table eating something, almost certainly something out of a tin, for Natalie was not a devoted housekeeper. She had spent the afternoon sunbathing on her verandah and, as on other days during this week of unusually hot weather, she had started by wearing a bikini and finished naked on the folding bed.

Marty Fiske came ambling across the Court and leaned on the fence, watching Willy at work, his eyes unwavering and vacant. Everybody treated Marty as a child though he was eighteen and powerfully built.

‘You give the flowers water, Mr Goppy?’

‘Yes, Marty.’

Marty laughed, gobbling his words, ‘Flowers like to drink, don’t they, Mr Goppy?’

‘They must have water, Marty.’

The same conversation, with minor variations, took place every time Marty happened to come along when Willy was tending his plants.

Mrs Fiske’s voice came from the far end of the Court: ‘Marty! Where are you? Your meal is on the table … Marty!’

She could not see them because of the tree.

‘I got to go now, that was mother.’

‘Good night, Marty.’

‘Good night, Mr Goppy.’

Willy’s part of the house comprised his shop, his workshop and a little hall on the ground floor; living-room, kitchen and bathroom on the first floor, and two bedrooms on the second. There was a square stairwell and a rather impressive staircase, relic of the original house. He went upstairs to the kitchen, washed his hands and started to prepare the evening meal – lamb chop, boiled potatoes, greens and mint sauce. His tastes in food had been wholly anglicized. The cat, too well fed to be importunate, curled up under the table.

Willy was below average height, thin, with sparse grey hair, dark eyes and sallow skin. His features were rather large for his face giving him a solemn yet clownish appearance. His kitchen was separated by only a thin partition from the Wards’ and their son, Henry, was in his bedroom playing jazz records very loud. Willy whistled through his teeth in time to the beat – not that he had a taste for jazz but he liked to be reminded of the life next door. He had watched the Ward children – Henry and Alison – growing up and he was fond of them both; they called him ‘Uncle’.

In the Ward’s living-room Alison was laying the table for their evening meal. Her mother had just come up from the shop and was in the kitchen preparing to serve the meal she had put in the oven earlier. Alison was sixteen and still at school; she wore the regulation school summer uniform – a short-sleeved frock in a small brown-and-white check; she had straight fair hair which draped itself over her shoulders, a peaches-and-cream complexion and serious blue eyes.

‘How were things at school today?’ Her mother’s voice came from the kitchen.

‘All right, I suppose. We had a history test on our holiday work and I didn’t like it much.’

‘I thought history was your best subject.’

Alison paused long enough to prevent the irritation she felt being apparent in her voice. ‘It was all on the seventeenth century, nothing on the eighteenth I spent so much time on.’

‘Never mind dear, I expect you did as well as the others.’

Julia Ward was a well meaning woman who never tired of looking on the bright side. At nineteen she had won a beauty contest and when the interviewer asked her what she wanted most in life she had answered: ‘I just want to make people happy.’

There were four places at the table; Alison’s father would come up from the shop at the last minute, probably when the soup was already on the table. Her brother Henry, who was seventeen, was up in his room listening to old records of Duke Ellington, his latest craze.

Four table knives, four forks, four soup spoons, four side-plates with green and gilt edging and four table napkins … Abruptly she experienced one of those moments when she seemed to exist outside herself, able to see herself as a stranger. She saw that girl who went to school and worked hard to learn things she did not want to know, the girl who spent two hours every night doing homework, the girl who helped her mother with household chores, the girl who next year would be in the sixth form working for ‘A’ levels … ‘It’s your future you’ve got to think of, dear.’ What future? Whose future? What would it be like to be the real Alison Ward? What would she do?

It was the time of day when the living-room caught the sun and golden light flooded in, seeming to vibrate to the brash rhythms of the music upstairs.

‘Alison! What are you thinking of, love? Your father will be up at any minute and the table not laid …’

‘Sorry.’

Natalie Cole was taking a shower; when she had finished she dried herself and walked through into the bedroom to look at her body in a full-length mirror. There was nothing narcissistic about the minute scrutiny to which she subjected herself; her body was one of her assets and, in the nature of things, a wasting one. Though not seriously so – yet.

At thirty-two she still looked girlish, her waist measurement had stayed at twenty-two ever since she had been interested enough to remember, and she had the lithe figure of a dancer; her belly was flat, her navel perfect and the pubic hair-line was low with no tendency to creep upward. A tiny appendix scar marred her right side. She remembered that surgeon: ‘You’ll have to wear a bit more bikini, young lady.’ Smug, leering bastard! Her breasts were firm and full …

Her skin was changing though, losing that velvet elasticity, especially on her legs and neck. She studied her face; she was no longer a pretty girl but was she a beautiful woman? Her jet black hair, just short of shoulder length, seemed to cling and mould itself to her head, framing her face in a classical oval. She had dark eyes which mirrored every subtle change in the light and her skin had a warm colour, as though lightly tanned, neither swarthy nor pale … So far so good; but there was something – something about the set of her mouth which was becoming more pronounced … If she had seen it in another woman she would have said, ‘There goes a bitch!’

‘Christ! I’m getting morbid.’

She turned to pick up her wrap from the bed and saw her daughter standing in the doorway watching her. Yvette was fifteen, slim and dark like her mother but seventeen years younger. The expression Natalie had surprised on her daughter’s face annoyed her; a look of detached appraisal.

‘What do you want?’

‘To tell you I’m going out.’

‘Have you done your homework?’ The question was part of a prescribed ritual, not intended to be answered.

‘Who are you going with?’

‘A girl.’

‘Not the Ward boy?’

‘No.’

‘You haven’t had a meal.’

‘I’ll get something out.’

Natalie watched her go. Jeans and a T-shirt; no bra, of course; and across the front of the T-shirt: ‘Restricted Area’, stencilled in red.

‘Poor little bastard!’ Natalie’s sympathy was not so much for her daughter as for her sex. She called out, ‘Don’t be late, Yvette!’

The front door slammed.

A few minutes later a car drove into the Court and she went to the window to see who it was. A Rover 2600, maroon and spotless. Martin Fiske, Marty’s father, was a business consultant with a firm of his own. The Fiskes lived in the house which faced up the Court. Natalie watched him put his car away and saw him come out of the garage, carrying his briefcase. Fiske was in his early forties, an ex-rugby player going slightly to seed; thinning hair, a self-important manner and the beginnings of a paunch. He wore a dove-grey light-weight suit, silk shirt and tie and suede shoes.

‘Smooth bastard!’

Fiske came downstairs from washing his hands and entered the dining-room just as his wife was bringing two bowls of soup from the kitchen. The table was laid for two.

‘Where’s Marty?’

‘In his room; I gave him his meal early because I know how much you dislike having to eat with him.’

Joan Fiske, at forty-eight, was thin, angular and careworn. Her manner towards her husband was a curious blend of subservience and aggression, like a dog who is sporadically ill-treated.

Fiske sat down, tucked in his napkin and tasted the soup before adding pepper and salt.

‘I want to talk to you, Martin.’

‘You surprise me. What about?’

She was crumbling a bread-roll into tiny fragments. ‘It’s about that woman, she’s been sunbathing on her verandah again, in the nude.’

Fiske soaked a piece of bread in his soup and chewed it.

‘It’s Marty I worry about. I mean, that sort of stimulation could lead to anything.’

‘I don’t suppose he even notices the woman.’

Mrs Fiske became irritated. ‘Of course he notices! He came in this afternoon and said “That lady out there with no clothes.” You know what the psychologist told us as well as I do.’

Fiske finished his soup and dabbed his lips with his napkin. His wife went on: ‘What a way for the mother of a young girl to carry on! But what can you expect from a woman who earns her living in a nightclub?’

‘She happens to own the club.’

‘What difference does that make? Those places are no better than brothels.’

Fiske turned his cold, fishy eyes on his wife. ‘Of course, you know about these things.’

Mrs Fiske shifted her ground. ‘I can’t imagine why you brought her here in the first place.’

Fiske cleared his throat but did not raise his voice. ‘I did not bring her here; I met her in the course of business; she happened to say that she was looking for a house and I mentioned that there was one vacant in the Court.’

Joan Fiske pushed away her soup scarcely touched, collected her husband’s plate and went through to the kitchen. There was no conversation while she served the second course, veal cutlets with beans and sauté potatoes, but when they were seated once more she took up where she had left off. ‘That man who lives with her, what does he do?’

Fiske sighed. ‘Bishop? I must have told you a dozen times, he runs a garage in Fenton Street; he sells second-hand cars and hires out cars and vans.’

‘He’s hardly ever home. I never see him.’

Fiske helped himself to more potatoes and gravy; his wife picked at her food then put down her knife and fork with an air of finality. ‘Anyway, I went to see Mrs Ward at the post office this afternoon. I told her about the sunbathing and I asked her to back me up in a protest.’

‘You did what?’ Fiske stopped eating to glare at his wife in sudden anger. ‘How many times have I told you not to get involved in gossip and squabbles in the Court? I can’t afford it! These people are clients of mine. I handle all Natalie Cole’s business as well as Bishop’s; and Willy Goppel is one of my best accounts. They’re my clients and your bread-and-butter. Do you understand?’

Mrs Fiske went over to the defensive. ‘I’m sure I’ve never done anything to upset Willy Goppel.’

‘No, but you will. You’ll think of something. His cat will shit on our grass or dig up a dandelion in your bloody flower-bed.’

Joan Fiske stared down at her plate and her features crumpled on the verge of weeping.

‘For God’s sake don’t start howling! I’ve had enough to put up with for one day.’

From upstairs came a low moaning sound; Marty was singing to himself as he made one of his simple jigsaws for the thousandth time.

The house on the fourth side of the Court was occupied by an elderly couple, the Hedleys. They were tall, lean and desiccated. Until four of five years back a nephew of Mrs Hedley, orphaned at the age of ten, had lived with them and they had brought him up. Now he and Willy Goppel’s son, Frederick, shared a flat in another part of the city. Mr Hedley was a retired council official while his wife came of a family with pretensions in the world of the arts and music and was considered to have married beneath her. As if to make the point their radio played classical music through much of the day when Mrs Hedley was not giving bravura piano performances of her favourite composers. The music furnished a subdued background to the other life of the Court. The Hedleys had their main meal at mid-day and he seemed to spend a lot of time moving uneasily about the house like a caged cat. From time to time he appeared on his verandah where he would stand, staring into space for ten minutes or more, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip.

The post office Wards had reached the dessert stage of their meal.

‘Mrs Fiske was in this afternoon, while you were at the bank.’

Edward Ward was eating strawberry mousse with a preoccupied air and his wife had to repeat her remark.

‘What did she want?’

‘She bought a few stamps but she wanted us to join her in a complaint about Mrs Cole.’

‘Because she keeps her car under the tree? Seems a bit childish, doesn’t it?’

‘It wasn’t about the car; she objects to Mrs Cole sunbathing in the nude on her verandah. She’s afraid it will upset Marty.’

‘I shouldn’t think Marty would notice one way or the other. Anyway, what did you say to her?’

‘I said that being in business we couldn’t afford to get involved with disagreements.’

Ward nodded. ‘Quite right too.’

‘Does she sunbathe in the nude?’ Alison looked across at her mother.

‘Apparently. I haven’t seen her.’

‘Have you seen her, Henry?’ Alison turned to her brother.

Henry, with sandy hair and freckles, blushed easily and he did so now to his intense annoyance. ‘No.’

‘You seemed to be getting on well with her the other morning.’

‘I helped her to start her car, that was all. She had a dodgy contact in the distributor.’

‘Was that wh. . .