Death in Desolation (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery)

by George Bellairs

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  Death in Desolation

  by

  George Bellairs

  1

  The Farmhouse Crimes

  IT COULD almost be said that Littlejohn got involved in the Farmhouse Murders by accident.

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1965 the newspaper headlines were monopolised by a series of carefully planned crimes in farmhouses in remote areas. The first occurred in Devonshire; the next in the Lake District; then in the Yorkshire Dales. Each crime greatly distant from the last and the whole country wondering where the next would happen.

  The robberies were committed with a minimum of violence. In most cases the victims were surprised at night, threatened, tied-up and gagged with transparent tape and their cash … nothing but cash … carried off. Once or twice, when the occupant showed resistance or lack of co-operation, he was hit over the head.

  The criminals had obviously made their plans carefully in advance. They appeared mainly on local mart days, which terminated after the banks had closed and left farmers with cash in hand from cattle deals. There were three operators and they never tackled any place with more than three people on the premises. The raiders had been carefully described over and over again from the start, but the details were of little help. They all wore black nylon stockings over their heads and faces, with black gloves on their hands and rope-soled slippers of the foreign espadrille type on their feet.

  They were a quick-moving lot. If there was a telephone to the place they visited, they cut the outside wires beforehand. If the farmer had a shotgun handy, one of them, who might have been a gymnast or a rugby player, was upon him in a flying tackle before he could use it. On one occasion only, when the victim had been too quick for the athlete, one of his companions had drawn a revolver and persuaded the farmer to hand over his own weapon. The leader was tall, thin and lithe, and attended to his business with speed and concentration; another, stocky and powerful, intent on overcoming scruples and resistance; the third was described as self-confident, almost cocky, a youngish man, nimble, slim and of medium height, who seemed to creep more than walk in a slimy sadistic way. They were all dressed in black trousers and sweaters and became known as the Black Lot.

  After the unsolved sixth crime in Pembrokeshire, there was a terrific public outcry. Half the police of the country and most of the men in rural areas were out after them, but nobody could pretend to guard every isolated farmhouse against the intruders. Everybody was, as usual, asking what the police were doing about it, especially after the seventh crime, when The Creep, as the youngest of the trio had been called, shot and badly wounded a farmer who refused to be intimidated and snatched at his mask. Then only had the leader lost his temper and struck his companion a vicious blow across the mouth with the back of his gloved hand.

  The police work had already been centralised under a Devonshire Superintendent, Warlock, who had taken charge of the first of the investigations and whose energy and intelligence, although hitherto unsuccessful, had attracted the attention of his superiors. He had worked night and day until his efforts were cut short by a coronary attack which placed him in hospital for the rest of the summer. There, he received flowers with a ‘Get Better Quickly’ card on which were stuck with transparent tape four words clipped from a newspaper: from the black lot.

  It was then that Littlejohn was appointed co-ordinator of the enquiry, and Cromwell was assigned to assist him.

  Almost at once another crime, this time murder, was reported, at Sprawle Corner, a remote hamlet, near Marcroft, in Midshire.

  When Littlejohn and Cromwell got out of the train at Rugby, Cromwell looked distastefully round the station.

  ‘An aunt of mine, the black sheep of the family, once ran off with a porter she met on Rugby station and was never seen again,’ he said, as if to himself.

  There wasn’t time for further details. Someone pushed his way through the crowd and dashed up to Cromwell.

  ‘Chief Superintendent Littlejohn? I recognised you right away from your photos in the paper. My name’s Crampitt, sir. Sergeant in the Midshire C.I.D. I’ve been sent to meet you. Rugby’s not exactly in our manor and if the local boys had known you were coming, they’d have had the red carpet out …’

  He cordially wrung Cromwell’s hand and looked expectantly at Littlejohn, waiting to be introduced.

  Littlejohn had difficulty in taking it seriously. Cromwell had to put his hand heavily on Crampitt’s shoulder to stop the gush of his welcome.

  ‘This is Chief Superintendent Littlejohn. My name’s Cromwell.’

  Crampitt wasn’t in the least put out. He was young and resilient and wore a natty dark grey suit and a jaunty cloth hat with a feather in the band. He removed the hat and revealed a crew cut.

  ‘I must have got you both mixed up. You were both in the picture in the paper, weren’t you? This way.’

  He led them through the milling crowds of travellers to a car standing in the forecourt of the station.

  ‘Superintendent Taylor asked me to come and meet you both. He’s been detained on the Sprawle Corner murder. He’ll be glad to see you. Superintendent Warlock was in charge of the farm crime cases, but his heart attack put an end to that. He’s still on the sick list and we’re having to improvise a bit …’

  He had relieved them of their luggage and rammed it in the boot of the police car, still talking. They all climbed in the vehicle.

  The sun was shining and the streets of Rugby were full of shoppers and cars. Crampitt drove quickly, but that didn’t prevent his talking. Littlejohn filled and lit his pipe and Crampitt apparently took this as permission to smoke himself. After pulling up at traffic lights, he rapidly produced a small cheroot for himself and another for Cromwell and lit them both before the lights changed to green. The car filled with the opulent smell of cigars.

  ‘We’ll take the road through the country to Marcroft. It passes Sprawle. The scenery’s nice, too.’

  They might have been going on a picnic.

  ‘Perhaps I’d better tell you a bit about the case, sir …’

  He took the silence as consent and although they were travelling at sixty he rattled off his tale, speaking round the cheroot.

  ‘Sprawle Corner’s a strange place. There are three farms there and four houses and a Methodist chapel, all unoccupied, except one, Great Lands, where the dead man and his wife lived. His name was Quill.’

  Crampitt coughed, opened the window and flung away his half-smoked cheroot impatiently as though it were choking him.

  ‘The Quills were a queer lot. I was born not far from Sprawle and know about them. Harry Quill, the murdered man, was the last of the older generation and the last of the family who farmed Great Lands for centuries. He’d no children and I suppose his three nephews will inherit the farm, such as it is.’

  ‘It’s not much of a place, then?’

  ‘Five hundred acres …’

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘It is bad, though. Harry Quill was off his head. There were three farms there: Great Lands, with three hundred acres, and two others with about a hundred acres apiece. One of the small holdings was farmed by a chap called Seal; the other by a man of the name of Russell. A tractor overturned and killed Seal; Russell got drinking and went bust. Quill bought both farms, added the land to his own and let the farmhouses go derelict. The doors and anything else portable were soon pinched,
the windows were all broken by hooligans and somebody even took slates off the roofs. The two farmhouses and a tied cottage that went with Isaac Seal’s holding are just skeletons in ruins now.’

  ‘But Quill farmed his five hundred acres?’

  ‘That’s just it. He didn’t. He simply bought the two hundred acres and left them as they were – plus more than two hundred acres of his own. Almost the whole of the farm he allowed to go back to the wild.’

  ‘Had he no stock?’

  ‘A few sheep in the fields surrounding the house, that’s all. The local agricultural committee took it up. They threatened what they’d do if he didn’t put the land under cultivation again or else stock it, but they didn’t seem to get very far. I don’t know why. When you visit the farm, you’ll see where all the five hundred acres, which had been salvaged from moorland at one time, are reverting to moorland again. You can see the wilderness encroaching like the tide coming in.’

  He paused as though admiring his metaphors.

  ‘What kind of a man was Harry Quill?’

  ‘He was always odd and a bit of a recluse. A middle-sized man, fattish, with a red, clean shaven face when he did shave, and a shock of thick grey hair which looked as if it had never seen a comb. He always looked as if he’d robbed a scarecrow in his style of dress. No collar, a brass stud in the neckband of his shirt, and old clothes. He used to run into Marcroft now and then to do some shopping. He was always alone. His wife was an invalid. I heard she’d had polio when she was young and walked like somebody who’d had a stroke. She was Harry Quill’s cousin and it’s said he married her to keep the money in the family.’

  ‘Was there money in the family, then?’

  ‘That’s a puzzle. After the murder, we had to go through the place and all the cash we found – his lawyer was with us to make matters regular – all the cash we found was about three pounds, four and ninepence halfpenny … I remember the halfpenny …’

  ‘What had Mrs. Quill to say about it?’

  ‘Not a thing. It seems Quill looked after all the money. With her being confined indoors, she never needed any cash and he never gave her any. There was no cheque book or bank passbook, no sign of invested savings … nothing. He either buried his cash or hid it in some safe place, or else the robbers found it and took it off with them. He used to pay his bills in cash and bought and sold odd items of stock now and then, so he must have had cash available more than we found …’

  They arrived at a signpost which pointed from the trunk road to a narrower one. Sprawle and Marcroft.

  The gradient gradually began to increase almost as soon as they left the highway and they snaked their way upwards to an acute corner with another sign: Sprawle. Cul-de-sac. They turned into a well-made road in which, however, two cars could only have passed with difficulty. Ditches along each side and tall bushes which cut off the view. Finally, the hedges thinned out and revealed the deserted hamlet which the murdered man, pursuing some crazy policy known only to himself, had denuded of inhabitants and left to go to rack and ruin.

  To the left, the land fell slowly away in the direction of the highway they had just left. To the right the ground rose in barren fields enclosed in crumbling stone walls, to open moorland topped by a small hill covered in bracken and gorse. The fields themselves were a wilderness, clad alternately in rank brown grass and the bright green moss and foliage of undrained marshes. Ahead lay the silent deserted hamlet of Sprawle.

  Crampitt reduced speed to a crawl to allow them to take it all in.

  ‘Since they took Mrs. Quill to hospital this place has been deserted, except for police, newsmen and morbid sightseers. Even a few hours after the crime was discovered, you couldn’t move for cars filled with people viewing the scene of the crime like a lot of vultures. In the end, we closed the road.’

  They had arrived in the hamlet itself. The road passed through it and ended at a cluster of tumbledown cottages in the distance. Crampitt was still talking like a courier conducting a lot of excursionists.

  ‘That clump of ruins at the end was once a community of crofters, who ran small farms – market gardens really – and sold their stuff on stalls at local markets. They packed up and went, one after another. They could earn better livings as roadmen, bus conductors and such like in the towns and have shops and cinemas on their doorsteps, instead of having to walk or cycle three or four miles every time they wanted a loaf or a bobbin of cotton …’

  They came to the first buildings along the road, two small stone farmhouses set in narrow enclosures with old trees and bushes sadly hanging over ruined garden walls and outhouses.

  ‘These are the two small farms I told you about. Lower Meadows and Lite’s Corner.’

  All the glass of the windows had been smashed by hooligans. The doors had been removed, too, and at Lower Meadows, which had a long corridor from front to back, they could see right through to the daylight beyond and the small derelict farmyard with a rotting mowing-machine in the middle of it. Half the slates of the Lite’s Corner roof had been removed and the beams were bare. The small tied cottage adjoining Lite’s ground had its front door nailed up. Someone had written across it Joe loves Marlene in paint which had once been white. The chimney had blown down and had crashed through the roof. In the overgrown front garden a torn-down, home-made sign. Trespasers will be prosected.

  Crampitt increased speed a little and they continued their crawl along the road, which deteriorated as they progressed. Now, they bumped among the potholes and ruts and a line of grass appeared running down the middle of the broken asphalt. It was obvious that somewhere in the vicinity the Rural District Council ceased to be responsible for the road and that Quill or someone equally slovenly and parsimonious took over.

  ‘Here we are. This is Great Lands.’

  Crampitt pulled up and got out. His companions followed him, glad to limber up their limbs, stiffened in the police car too small for men of their dimensions. They all stood in front of the dilapidated farmhouse in contemplation. Crampitt leaned on the gate.

  ‘Not much of a place, eh?’

  Cromwell winked at Littlejohn behind Crampitt’s back. The young detective, if such he could be called, seemed to have taken the initiative for the whole outing instead of, as instructed, simply being sent to meet them and conduct them to his superior officers. He was more like an estate agent showing them over a property and at the same time running it down because he didn’t wish them to buy it.

  ‘Must have been a nice place in its prime. Now just a tumbledown ruin.’

  The farm was a massive place. Four up and four down, at least, stone built with a huge square front and broad steps ascending from a large desolate overgrown garden. In the rear they could see a series of substantial outbuildings providing a windbreak and protection for the house. The whole was surrounded by an impressive stone wall, broken by great gates in front and behind and could have been, in its heyday, completely shut off from the outside world, like those fortified Breton farmhouses strongly protected from the sea and especially from the marauders who came across it.

  The front gates were open. The hinges were rusted, the wood rotten and they looked ready to collapse if you tried to move them. The beds of the front garden were covered in weeds and rank grass. At some time there must have been roses cultivated there, for there were briers, gone back to nature, rambling all over the place. Gaunt trees hung over it and the rotted leaves of past years covered the paths. A stone building, once perhaps a potting-shed, stood in one corner without a roof and from inside a tree had sprung and its trunk protruded through the spars.

  ‘We’d better take a look over the place, just to give you some idea …’

  Crampitt had brought the key with him and had unlocked the front door. They all entered.

  Every house has its own peculiar smell and that of this place wasn’t at all pleasant. The Quills had lived alone, the woman had been an invalid. Presumably the house had been neglected. They knew that as soon as they stepp
ed in the hall. The kitchens, drains, damp walls and carpets, the abandonment of every effort to keep the place properly clean all contributed their share to the tainted air, shut in behind closed windows. Above all there was one dominating odour …

  ‘Have there been some cats shut up in here?’ asked Littlejohn, puffing hard at his pipe.

  It seemed to remind Crampitt that he ought to counter the complaint and he took out another cheroot, handed one to Cromwell and lit them both.

  ‘There were four cats. After Mrs. Quill and her husband’s body were taken away, the cats must have been locked in. They must have hidden somewhere. We had to get the R.S.P.C.A. along to dispose of them. They were all old and helpless …’

  They passed from room to room of the forlorn farmhouse. It was like a dream world, a fantastic scene from a gothic novel. Two only of the rooms seemed to have been used. The large kitchen and a small adjoining room used as a bedroom. The former was cheaply furnished with a large rough table on which the remnants of a meal, spread on old newspapers instead of a cloth, still remained. A couple of plain wooden chairs, drawn up, as their occupants had left them before the tragedy. A rocking-chair and a saddleback upholstered in horsehair at the fireside; a large plain wooden dresser along one side, with a motley assortment of crockery arranged on the shelves.

  There were no modern amenities. The kitchen was flagged and the damp stone added to the general smell of the place. Pieces of matting here and there. A stone sink with a large brass tap. The fireplace with an oven on each side was huge and blackleaded. Any hot water seemed to have been drawn from a boiler at one side. The dead remains of a small fire in the grate and two dirty pans on the hob. Great empty hooks in the beams where perhaps hams had hung in better times.

  In modern days, how could such a place exist?

  The rest of the house was even worse. Like a caricature of the castle of the Sleeping Beauty in which everybody has fallen asleep and dust and cobwebs had slowly obliterated all signs of normal habitation. The bedroom, with the soiled linen and a patchwork quilt jumbled on the huge, brass-knobbed double bed, just as they had been left after the crime. A chest of drawers, a cane-bottomed chair and two large cheap wardrobes, which emitted a blast of mothballs when they opened them and which contained a motley confused assortment of men’s and women’s clothes, moth-ridden and rotting on their hooks.