The Other Devil's Name

by E. X. Ferrars

  In the end both he and Constance finished their duck and their wine and had some coffee and afterwards walked back to Lindleham, walking very slowly, as if they were both reluctant to arrive and to find out what was being done there. The wind had lessened during the time that they had been in the Swan and patches of blue sky showed here and there amongst the still-hurrying clouds.

  On the way they talked very little, but after a while Andrew observed, “You know, Constance, I’m not sure you haven’t solved these murders.”

  “I?” she said incredulously.

  “Yes, there are certain things you’ve said…” He did not finish the sentence, mainly because he was not sure how to finish it. Yet he had another of his hunches concerning what had happened during the past week amongst the people whom he had met here and what would be found when the police dug up the grave of the Yorkshire terrier. He did not want to be there when that occurred and hoped that Constance need not be there either. She had taken enough of an emotional battering already over Mollie’s death without requiring any more. If they could reach home and stay there quietly until Superintendent Stonor came to tell them the results of his investigation, it would be best for both of them.

  But it was not to be. When they turned at the crossroads into Bell Lane they saw not only that the police were there in force but also that the village of Clareham had somehow become informed that there were events of great interest going forward in Lindleham and had come in considerable numbers to observe, to comment and to share in any excitement that might be generated there. Three police cars were drawn up in a row outside the Eckersalls’ gate and several uniformed constables were doing their best to keep the audience at bay, but men, women and children had moved up as close as they were able and were standing in the lane in groups, some tensely silent, some inclined to offer advice to the police or merely demanding to be told what was happening.

  When it came to the point, that same curiosity gripped Constance, and she stood still in her gateway, turning to look across the lane towards the Eckersalls’ house. She had had some difficulty, apart from penetrating the waiting crowd, in persuading a policeman who wanted to turn her and Andrew back to Clareham that they only wanted to reach her home. Andrew saw that the Gleesons were in their gateway and that Naomi Wakeham was in hers, and on the edge of the crowd farther up the lane he saw Nicholas Ryan.

  Jean and Kate Eckersall were in the doorway of their house, their hands tightly clasped together and their eyes fixed with horrified fascination on what was happening in their precious little burial ground under the shadow of the chestnut tree that leant from the Gleesons’ garden over theirs. Though the wind had almost died it stirred the branches of the old tree enough to send a shower of petals from the blossom that covered it down over the ground beneath it like confetti being thrown at some fantastic wedding.

  But there was very little to be seen. The police had erected canvas screens round the whole dogs’ cemetery and no one could tell just what was happening behind them. There was only the sound of spades being thrust over and over again into the ground to tell the watchers that digging was continuing and that nothing had been found yet.

  Thud, thud…

  Andrew found a quotation taking possession of his mind, but this time for once it was Shakespeare.

  Knock, knock! Who’s there i’ the other devil’s name?

  Who, if anyone, would they find there when they had dug deep enough? Andrew thought he knew, though he was still not absolutely certain.

  A child who was standing in front of him turned round and looked up at him.

  “What’s happening?” he asked. “What are they doing?”

  He was a very dirty child. That was the first thing that Andrew noticed about him. He was far dirtier than any child would be allowed to be in a respectable village like Clareham. Dirt caked his forehead, his cheeks and his neck. It was natural to think that there were probably lice in his hair. He was very thin too, as if it was some time since he had had a good meal. His pullover was filthy and in holes. His jeans were even more stained and tattered than was normal for children of his age, which was about eleven, and long black uncut toenails protruded through what was left of a pair of canvas shoes. His hair was red. The same red as Leslie Gleeson’s.

  Andrew grasped him by the arm. He had a feeling that if he did not keep tight hold of the child he might vanish away in the crowd in a moment and be lost again.

  “You’re Colin!” he said.

  “Let me go, you’re hurting me,” the child said.

  “Sorry,” Andrew said, but he did not loosen his grip. The arm in his grasp was matchstick thin. “Come along, your mother’s over there. Can’t you see her? Don’t you want her?”

  The child tried to pull away from him. “No, he’s there. I don’t want to go while he’s there.”

  “He won’t be there long,” Andrew said. “Come along.”

  “But what’s happening?” the boy asked as before. “What are they doing?”

  “Never mind about that now. Come on.”

  Tears began to spill out of the boy’s eyes and to make tracks down the dirt on his cheeks.

  “Is it because of the dog I killed?” he asked. “I never meant to kill him. Honest. I never thought I could hit him. I never hit anything I aimed at. When he died I was frightened. Is that why they’re here—because I killed him?”

  “Not exactly,” Andrew said. “We’ll go into that some other time. Now we’ll go and talk to your mother. Don’t you want to do that? There’s no need to be frightened anymore.”

  The boy let out a sudden wail and somehow jerked himself free of Andrew’s grasp. But it was towards his mother that he ran. She was standing alone in the gateway now. Jim Gleeson had disappeared. A moment before the boy reached her she saw him, gave an incredulous cry of joy and held out her arms to him. He flung himself into them with a look of frenzied hunger and love. Both started crying violently.

  There was a sudden stir in the crowd. Andrew had not noticed while he had been talking to Colin that Naomi had left her gate and had returned to her house, but now he saw her car come out of the garage and, driven at reckless speed, swerve out through the gate, shoot through the crowd, which scattered to right and left in panic, and disappear down the lane towards Clareham. He had a glimpse of Naomi’s face before she vanished, white and set and crazed with fear. At the same moment he realized that the thudding of the spades had stopped. There was silence in the Eckersalls’ garden.

  Andrew and Constance waited side by side until Stonor appeared from behind the canvas screens, then Andrew went towards him.

  “You’ve found him?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Wakeham?”

  “Yes.”

  “Murdered by his wife, I believe,” Andrew said, “who murdered Mollie Baird and David Pegler also. She’s just taken off for Clareham in a hurry, but no doubt you’ll be able to pick her up quite soon, unless she crashes her car first, which I think she might. I don’t think she knows what she’s doing. But you can still get Gleeson, her accomplice, if you hurry. It’ll save you the trouble of chasing him.”

  Andrew was right about Naomi’s fate. At the crossroads she did not turn left into Clareham, but drove straight on along the narrow winding lane beyond. Whether or not she had any clear idea of where she was going no one was ever to know, for at a bend in the lane she drove at seventy head-on into a lorry. The crash did not kill her, but she was dead by the time she arrived at the hospital in Maddingleigh. The driver of the lorry also had to be taken to the hospital and treated for shock.

  Meanwhile it was announced on radio and television that evening that a man was helping the police with their inquiries into the murders of Michael Wakeham, Mollie Baird and David Pegler. Later Jim Gleeson was charged with being an accessory to the three murders and was remanded in custody.

  Andrew remained in Lindleham until after the inquest into Mollie’s death and her funeral. Before that he had heard that
small smears of blood that matched hers had been found on the floor of Naomi’s kitchen, although this had been energetically scrubbed, and there were more in the boot of Jim Gleeson’s car. But before that, in the evening after the body of Mike Wakeham had been disinterred, Andrew and Constance had had some time to themselves. She had been very quiet and, as Andrew had been able to see, had been turning something over in her mind, trying to work out its meaning before consulting him.

  At last she said, “When we were on our way home from the Swan, Andrew, you said you thought I might have solved these murders. Why did you say that?”

  “There were two things you said,” he answered. “You said you couldn’t imagine Naomi covering up for the murder of a child, that she just wouldn’t be interested. At the time we thought it was possible that Gleeson might have murdered Colin, though Wakeham was also a possible victim. And if it was Wakeham, who was the likeliest person to have killed him? Naomi herself, of course. In cases like this, the husband or wife is always the first suspect. And whom would she really try to cover up for with her story of the imaginary Vauxhall? Who but herself? Who else did she ever care about? But if she killed Wakeham, which for all we’ll ever know she may have done defending herself when he attacked her in a fit of jealous rage when he somehow found out she’d a lover, she couldn’t have buried him. If she killed him in their house, she couldn’t possibly have disposed of the body. A body’s a heavy, unwieldy thing to handle. So it meant that she’d an accomplice. And who was the most probable one? You thought of Nicholas as a possible murderer. But he’d an alibi for the time Wakeham disappeared, so I began to think of Gleeson. His wife was often out in the evenings, you’d told me, at meetings of the Women’s Institute or pottery classes, and it would have been easy for him and Naomi to meet in the Gleesons’ cottage. She’d have concocted one of her remarkable stories to explain to her husband why she had to go out. Perhaps she said she was taking lessons in Russian in Maddingleigh, or something equally colourful. But he didn’t quite believe her and discovered what was happening and there was a quarrel which left him dead, killed with a kitchen knife, and her with a corpse on her hands. So what did she do? She telephoned her lover, of course, and between them they took Wakeham’s body to the Eckersalls’ garden and buried him in the freshly dug patch of earth where the sisters had buried their dog before taking off for the Highlands. A pretty laborious job even though the ground had been dug over recently, and Gleeson, who of course did the digging, hurt his back and has been having trouble with it ever since. And Pegler, driving home down the lane from a late call, saw them doing it and started the dangerous game of blackmail.”

  “You said there were two things that helped to solve the murder,” Constance said. “What was the other thing?”

  “Only that the word you can be singular or plural,” Andrew answered. “Until then I hadn’t thought seriously of Naomi as being involved in the murders. I thought it might be Gleeson who had killed either Colin or Wakeham and been seen by Pegler, but the obvious thing hadn’t occurred to me that he could have seen two people doing the job and was putting the screw on them both.”

  “And you think it was Naomi who killed both Mollie and David?”

  “That’s how it looks to me. She told us she overtook Mollie at the crossroads and offered her a lift home and Mollie refused it. I think Naomi must have told us about having seen Mollie there because she knew someone had seen them talking and might remember it. She may have thought Nurse Grace could have seen them before she drove off. But I don’t think Mollie did refuse the lift. I think Naomi had some sob story about the husband who had abandoned her and how badly she needed to talk to someone, and poor, kind Mollie went with her and was taken into the kitchen to help make some coffee and was stabbed to death there. And then, of course, Naomi had another corpse on her hands, so she rang up Gleeson, who she knew hadn’t gone to work that day because he was going to see the doctor, and again he disposed of the body. But this time it had to be done in a hurry, before Leslie got home from the sale in Maddingleigh, and who might want the car later in the day and anyway who’d want to know why he had to go out in the evening if he waited for darkness. So he bundled Mollie into the car and dumped her in the stream, taking the appalling risk of being seen. But he got away with it for the time being. And then, of course, they had to dispose of Pegler.”

  “You think Mollie told Naomi that morning, when they met in the shop before Mollie went to the surgery, that she’d something important to discuss with David and Naomi misunderstood what it was.”

  “Yes, because you’ve got to remember that either Naomi or Gleeson had had a letter from Pegler thanking whichever of them it was for a contribution to the building of the new cricket pavilion, when neither of them had made any contribution. I think the person who probably did was Nicholas. And Naomi, who was getting used to murder, or possibly had even begun to enjoy it, and who’d no wife who’d want to know why her husband suddenly had to go out in the evening, went down to Pegler’s house and repeated the stabbing business, in which she must have become quite proficient, and slipped quietly home. There was no need to get rid of the body that time. It wasn’t in her house. She could leave him where he fell, to be discovered in the morning.”

  Constance nodded thoughtfully, accepting Andrew’s reconstruction of the events of the last few days.

  “How long ago did you think of all this?” she asked.

  “Well, I told you I had a hunch about it, didn’t I?” he said. “But I couldn’t be sure of it till I knew who the victim was. So I suppose you can say I didn’t really know what to think till that child Colin spoke to me.”

  It was that same evening that Leslie and Colin visited Constance.

  Colin by then had been put into a bath and been scrubbed from head to foot, as well as presentably reclothed. It seemed probable to Andrew that he had also been fed, yet when Constance produced a plateful of potato crisps to go with the milk that she offered him while the adults settled for whisky, he snatched up a handful of them and stuffed them into his mouth, chewing them up and swallowing them down as if he were afraid they might vanish if he did not dispose of them quickly. Apart from that he was subdued and disinclined to talk. Leslie apologized for his behaviour.

  “You know, he’s really frightened of not having enough to eat,” she said. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take to fill the great yawning emptiness of his stomach. D’you know how he’s been living all this last month? I hardly like to tell you. He’s been stealing. Begging too sometimes, going into shops and looking pathetic and being given a meat pie or something. But mostly he’s been shoplifting from supermarkets, and stealing from stalls in street markets and people’s gardens and sometimes even from hen houses, taking the eggs and eating them raw. And he’s been sleeping in churches. He’d creep in before they shut them up for the night and hide somewhere, then make himself a bed of the hassocks and really be quite comfortable and slip out in the morning before the early service. Of course, he never washed. Then he came across a group of young people who were living in a ruined cottage he doesn’t seem to know quite where, and they took him in and looked after him as well as they could, though they didn’t seem to have much money themselves, or anything to eat but tins of beans. And when they asked who he was and where he came from, he said he couldn’t remember. Quite clever of him, really.”

  There was an odd note of pride in Leslie’s voice, as if she felt that there was something admirable in her son’s capacity for survival.

  She went on: “But then one of them saw a television programme when he was passing a shop that sold radios and things, and it happened there was a picture of Colin on the screen just then, with an appeal to anyone who saw him to contact the police. Well, they didn’t do that, because they weren’t the sort of people who’d ever go to the police about anything, but they told Colin how terrible his mother must be feeling, and they gave him some money and put him on a train to Maddingleigh, then he took a bus to g
et here. And I wish I could thank them, but he doesn’t know anything about them except that they were called Barry and Terry and Tracey and Sue. When he first came home he wouldn’t say anything about what he’d been doing. He only cried and cried and ate and ate. But then suddenly he started talking and it’s been going on ever since. I expect there’s lots more to come. Oh, Constance, you don’t know how I feel, having him safe at home again when I was sure he’d died some horrible death. It’s just as if I’d come out of some terrible black cloud into daylight.”

  “And Jim?” Constance asked.

  Leslie said nothing for a moment, then with the excitement quenched in her voice, answered quietly, “Let’s not talk about that. I haven’t begun to take it in yet. Awful as it is, it’s a kind of relief to know I’m going to be free again. I loved him once, but it seems a long time ago. Some day perhaps I’ll be able to forget it all. I know it’s desperately selfish, but all that really matters to me now is that I’ve got Colin back.”

  The plate of potato crisps was empty. Colin looked hungrily up at Constance, who got up obligingly and went to get some more.

  When at last Andrew was able to return to London, he and Constance took an affectionate farewell of one another and agreed that they would meet for lunch as soon as this was convenient for Constance. She drove him to the station in Maddingleigh and left him there to buy his ticket and a copy of the Financial Times, which was his favourite reading on short train journeys.

  Making his way on to the platform where the London train was expected, he sat down on a bench to wait. He was at least twenty minutes earlier than he need have been, but he had a habit of arriving considerably earlier than was necessary to catch trains and planes. He could not remember that he had ever missed one by being late, but there was always an anxiety at the back of his mind that one day it would happen. Since he was as fond of Constance as he was, he was a little disturbed to discover how peaceful it felt to be sitting there on the platform with only strangers around him who had no interest in him whatever.