by Roy Lewis
‘So he seemed … upset.’ Gully considered. ‘But he gave you no reason for his disappearance. What was it made him leave the stables, do you think?’
‘Can’t say, Mr Gully.’
‘You’ve no idea why didn’t he turn up for work after Wednesday?’
‘I honestly don’t know, Mr Gully,’ Smith replied, staining his tones with innocence.
‘It wasn’t because he had an argument with you? No fuss about Running Rein?’
‘No, I swear!’ Smith protested.
‘No argument with anyone else?’
There was a brief hesitation. ‘There wasn’t anyone else around that day, apart from the grooms, I mean,’ Smith replied earnestly. ‘I mean, Bartle looked out of sorts, but there was no quarrel.’
‘Mmm.’ A light breeze had arisen, ruffling Gully’s hair. He looked at me, thoughtfully, and then turned back to Cornelius Smith. ‘So I suppose, in a sense, as far as we can tell, you were the last person to see Joe Bartle before he went off … wherever he went off to.’
Smith shrugged. ‘I suppose you can say that.’
‘Do you think maybe he disappeared because he didn’t want to give evidence in the Running Rein trial?’
‘I couldn’t say, Mr Gully.’ An edge of confidence was creeping into Smith’s voice. He was feeling more self-assured.
‘Perhaps it was because he’d been told to make himself scarce,’ Gully suggested softly.
Cornelius Smith shrugged his narrow shoulders, carelessly. ‘I already told you. I keep telling you. I don’t know why he disappeared, Mr Gully.’
‘It would hardly be Mr Wood who’d want him to disappear,’ Gully mused, almost to himself. ‘Bartle was due to give evidence to support Mr Wood … and confirm Mr Goodman’s evidence, of course … so they wouldn’t want him out of the way.’
Smith shook his head, indifferently. ‘I can’t say. Not thought about it.’
‘Of course, there’s always the thought that perhaps Bartle had decided not to support Goodman’s story. Now that would have made his presence in the courtroom uncomfortable for Mr Goodman, wouldn’t it?’
‘I don’t really see—’
Gully held up a warning hand. ‘Just let me think this through for a moment, Mr Smith. Aloud. There was no quarrel, you say, but Bartle clearly had something on his mind on the Wednesday. Next day he didn’t turn up at the stables: he just disappeared, and you made no enquiries about him.’
‘No cause to. Employed by the horse owner, he was. Wasn’t my place to arsk around. He’s a growed man …’
‘But he was a witness in the Running Rein hearing and the evidence he would have given, in support of Mr Wood’s case has now gone. Disappeared with him.’ Gully shook his head thoughtfully. ‘Yes, it seems to me that the whole question of Bartle’s disappearance has to do with the trial and the later abduction of Running Rein. Wouldn’t you say so, Smith?’
The stableowner shrugged his shoulders regretfully. ‘I don’t really have an opinion, Mr Gully.’ The curry comb began to work briskly once more.
‘I’m beginning to form one, however,’ Ben Gully said pleasantly as he returned his pipe to the deep pocket of his chesterfield. ‘There’s got to be a link between the theft of Running Rein and the disappearance of Joe Bartle. And in a sense, you’re the key to the lock that shuts the truth to us.’
‘Me? How is that, Mr Gully?’
Gully glanced at me. ‘Mr James, here, he’s had some thoughts about the matter. Ever since he found what he did in the sewers under Kent Street.’
It was my time to step forward. I frowned seriously, intervening for the first time. Cornelius Smith froze, staring at me. ‘Yes, that’s right. In my considered opinion you’re the key, Mr Smith, because you were the last person, it seems, to have seen Joseph Bartle alive.’
For a long moment the statement failed to register with Cornelius Smith. He gaped at me, turned to look open-mouthed at Gully, and struggled to form the words. ‘You say … alive? You mean Joe Bartle’s dead?’ He was sweating again. He was panicked.
In questioning Cornelius Smith that day, it was the first time I saw the kind of panic that in later years I was able to induce regularly in the witness box under cross-examinations at the Old Bailey. It brings to one a kind of triumph, a superiority, a confidence that surges through the veins, a belief that further probing can tear a man’s will apart, shred his confidence. It’s the wash of feeling I had at that moment, I felt I could read Smith’s mind: he knew something to his detriment; he was holding something back from us, but he could not imagine how things had come to this. Disappearance. Death. Somewhere along the line he had allowed himself to walk into a trap, and now he could not think straight. ‘Joe Bartle’s dead?’ he said again, stupidly.
‘As last week’s mutton.’ I confirmed. ‘And as far as we can determine, you were the last person to see him.’
I folded my arms magisterially. I looked at Gully and nodded.
Gully smiled, and reached into his waistcoat pocket. He took out the watch, glanced at it, shook it and held it to his ear before smiling in satisfaction. ‘Still working. Now then Smith, in my experience … and it is an extensive experience in matters of skulduggery … a man who owns an expensive watch like this takes a certain pride in its possession. If he loses it, he’s likely to report the loss; if he sees it taken by an urchin he raises a hue and cry. But nothing like that seems to have happened in relation to this watch.’
Cornelius Smith was staring at the hunter, a rabbit fascinated by a snake.
‘I got sources,’ Gully continued. ‘We’ve already followed them up. And they led me to the owner of this piece. He was in the sewer under Kent Street. And the polis have been informed. By Mr James.’
‘The peelers?’ Cornelius Smith croaked.
‘No less,’ Gully said gravely. He glanced at me.
‘I laid the information myself,’ I confirmed. ‘But I named no names. I thought it best we should have a little discussion with you first.’
‘So the peelers don’t yet know who he is.’ Ben Gully nodded, as though confirming something in his own mind. ‘Never did like peelers. They got this tendency to jump to conclusions. Not least about the blokes who last saw the corpse alive. So, I don’t care to offer them assistance. And Mr James and me, well we got our reasons for looking for the truth. So we ask ourselves, who would want to do a job on Bartle … maybe the horse-coopers, you think, Mr Smith? Or perhaps it was he who was involved with taking the horse. Maybe he had an agreement with these mysterious horse-coopers since the Wednesday that he disappeared from the stables. Maybe later it was they who done him in. Who knows? Who could know, if he was dead?’ He watched as the little stableowner’s features took on a faint shade of green.
Casually, I nodded, appearing to consider the matter, ‘Yes, Gully, I suppose it’s possible that Bartle died at the weekend, or maybe later. Or there’s the distinct possibility that he died here on the Wednesday, the day on which Mr Smith saw him. Dumped later in the sewer. Who’s to say? I don’t doubt the police will form a view, however.’
The perspiration was trickling down the back of the stableowner’s neck. I could see the beads staining his grubby shirt collar. ‘He can’t have died here, Mr James, I don’t know nothin’ about it! I’ve said all I know.’ He rubbed his sleeve against his nose in a snuffling gesture. ‘I told you … Joe Bartle left here on Wednesday afternoon—’
‘So you say,’ I commented, shrugging.
‘But that’s the way of it. You can’t be suggesting—’
‘I’ll tell you what I’m suggesting, Smith,’ Gully interrupted, his tone hardening. ‘I don’t think you’ve been entirely honest about all this. I think you’re in this business up to your neck. I don’t know what happened here, but I think you had a quarrel of some sort with Joe Bartle. Maybe he told you he didn’t want to give evidence for Mr Goodman. Maybe told you he was keeping out of the way. I think words were exchanged. I think you took your chance to beat hi
m and then—’
‘That’s nonsense!’ Cornelius Smith dropped his curry comb. His voice rose to a panicked squeak. ‘I had no quarrel with Joe Bartle. I hardly knew him.’
‘But it seems you were the last to see him alive!’ I snapped.
‘I didn’t even know Joe was dead!’ Smith expostulated in panic.
One of the peculiar attributes of Ben Gully was the manner in which he could explode into violence. His tone could be gentle one moment, his appearance casual, and yet the next he could be all menacing muscle. I saw the transformation in that moment. In a swift motion he reached out, grabbed the squirming stableowner by the shirt front. He thrust his grim, scarred features close to those of the terrified stableman. ‘All right, maybe it wasn’t a personal quarrel between you and Bartle … maybe you were told to smash his face in! Or maybe you were here when someone else did it. Whatever the truth, there’s only you to talk about it. You were last to see him around here. What’ll the peelers make of that, Smith? What if they find something here in the stables to incriminate you? Like this watch, for instance?’
‘But I never seen that watch before! It was you brought it here!’
‘But if we was to say we found it here,’ Gully pressed.
‘A jury would probably believe us rather than you,’ I asserted. ‘And you know, there are other judges like Baron Alderson who have no love of the Turf, or of Turf men …’
‘You’d be hung out to dry,’ Gully murmured quietly.
‘And in view of my interest in the matter,’ I intervened in a grimy tone, ‘I would be prepared to act for the prosecution without fee!’
There was a long silence. Spittle drooled from Smith’s loose, open mouth. Gully leaned forward, brushed at Smith’s shoulder with a gnarled, reassuring hand. ‘I think Mr James would find it easy to convince judges like Baron Alderson that you were lying in your teeth, that Bartle had changed his mind about the evidence he was going to give, that you were under instructions to do something about it…. And after beating him to death, you kept the watch for yourself, before selling it to some fence in town.’
Cornelius Smith twisted in Gully’s firm grip, a panicked rabbit trying to escape the net. ‘No, it wasn’t like that!’
Sweating profusely, the stableman wriggled desperately, stamped his feet in the cobbled yard. Once again I could read it in his twisted features. He was involved, but he hadn’t been paid to deal with issues like this. Entering a ringer in a race was one thing; turning a blind eye to the stealing of a nag was no great matter to him. But getting dragged into a murder enquiry … that was another matter.
‘I think it’s time I went to Bow Street again, to add to the information I’ve already laid, Gully,’ I said, gloomily shaking my head. ‘There could be a charge of murder, here … it’s out of our hands.’
‘You tell me Joe Bartle’s been done in, but I had nothing to do with it!’ Cornelius Smith almost screamed, shaking his head violently. And then, after the outburst, the life seemed to drain out of him. His head dropped, he was limp in Gully’s grasp. His hands were hanging lifelessly by his side.
‘If the peelers learn you were the last to see him alive,’ I pressed ruthlessly.
‘No.’ There was a short silence. Gully and I waited, while the stableowner sweated with his fear of the man who had paid him against the terror inspired by the thought of a rope around his neck. ‘No, there was someone else here that Wednesday afternoon.’
‘Who?’ Gully asked, almost dreamily.
‘Sam McGuire.’
There was something familiar about the name. I stared at Gully, puzzled, raised my eyebrows. Then I recalled it, from my court brief. ‘McGuire? You mean the man who trained Running Rein in Ireland?’
‘That’s right.’ Smith nodded anxiously, despondency and panic suddenly turning to an eagerness to please. He was emboldened by the possibility of seeing a neck other than his own being stretched in a noose. ‘And I saw them here in the stables, that day. There was a quarrel. They was having words, voices raised, down here in the yard. McGuire was here. He was quarrelling with Bartle. So I wasn’t the last one to see Joe. It could be him who done for Joe Bartle, later!’
Gully smiled thinly. ‘So what have you been paid to keep quiet about, Mr Smith? You’d better tell us all about it, my friend. If not murder, what was it?’
Smith shook his head in terror, but the pressure had all been too much for him, and he seemed almost glad to be able to confess to something that would have nothing to do with the death of Joe Bartle. He half-sobbed, his breath rasping in his throat, and he finally told us what we had wanted to hear. ‘It was the horse.’
‘You helped in the abduction?’
Smith shook his head. ‘Not exactly. I was paid to look the other way. When the coopers came. And then, later, after he was put down, I had to help bury him.’
‘The horse? You buried him?’ I gasped.
‘That’s right. We buried him. Running Rein.’
It was late evening when we reached the location.
Above our heads in the darkness of the overhanging trees an owl screeched, its harsh, lonely call echoing eerily across the narrow valley. We had engaged two men – who according to Gully knew how to keep their mouths shut – and we made our way by the light of a bull’s-eye lantern, following Cornelius Smith, picking our path across a small stream, stumbling among hidden rocks in the bushes that covered the floor of the valley. After a little while we emerged on the far slope that led down to the flat pastureland beyond the trees. There we paused, sweating, and the two diggers at the rear hefted their shovels uneasily as they looked about them with nervous glances. They were being paid well enough for this evening’s work but they had no love for it: they could not understand the urgency that had driven their paymasters out under a moonless, sharp sky where the shadows lay deep under the faint starlight and night sounds whispered and rustled about them.
We crossed the field and passed through a wooden gate. The small field was surrounded by dark, silent copses of hawthorn and oak. After a certain hesitancy, our shivering, frightened leader at last called a halt. Smith looked about him, kicking at the turf; he trudged around at the edge of the clearing for a little while, a little bow-legged man dogged with uncertainty, until at last he paused to the right of a small stretch of low bushes. He kicked again with his boot at the loose turf and uttered an exclamation. Then he turned and raised his arm, beckoning us forward.
‘Here!’ he called. ‘It was here, I’m certain.’
Ben Gully stepped forward. He had draped himself in a long black cloak against the night air and a dark hat hid his battered features. He stood beside Cornelius Smith and dug his heel into the turf. He nodded, turned and gestured to the men with the shovels, while I stood back under the trees, a little distance apart, watching the men as they began their work.
I hadn’t been sure I wanted to be present at this occasion, but curiosity had drawn me. The scene was macabre. I watched the men as they dug: they were railway navigators, middle-aged men with bowed backs and hard muscles who had worked for years on the canals and the railway cuttings and who were always prepared to do a dirty job provided the pay was right. Even so, working in the darkness in this manner was another matter, in spite of the ale that they had consumed at the expense of the man in the cloak, and a certain reluctance had marked their passage across the clearing, but once they started they went to it with a will.
I stood there watching silently. Ben folded his arms as he hunched there overseeing. The two navigators thrust their spades into the turf, swearing occasionally in an Irish brogue, shoving and stamping with their heavily booted feet, turning the sod, clearing an area, and grunting as they struck something other than earth or stone, hawking and spitting noisily as the smell rose to their nostrils from what lay under the earth.
I heard the owl hooting again, more distantly now, a call that was challenged by the faraway screech of a young buzzard in the trees nearby. Then the valley was quiet a
gain as the sweating navigators rested on their shovels, breathing harshly, faintly staining the air with their beery exhalations.
‘Get on with it,’ Gully snapped at last, while Cornelius Smith stood shivering by his side.
The shovels thudded dully into the earth once more and as the first evidence was exposed they moved sideways, digging in a wider area, turning over the cold black earth as the luminescence appeared, shining and glimmering bone-white under the faint starlight.
‘It’s here it’ll be, bejazus,’ one of them grunted suddenly, and stood aside. ‘Sure enough, as the man says.’
Ben Gully glanced back to where I stood under the trees, twitched his cloak and leaned forward. He raised the dark lantern, unshuttered the bull’s eye and shone it down into the area of disturbed earth. Slowly, I made my way forward until I stood at his elbow. The navigators had stepped aside. Ben and I stared at the thing that lay at our feet: the bones were almost bare, the flesh already half eaten away in the quicklime that had been liberally thrown about the carcass, but there was no doubt in Ben’s mind, nor mine, about what the navigators had uncovered.
Ben Gully leaned forward, snatched a shovel from one of the navigators and clattered its blade against bone. He heaved and there was an evil sucking sound as he turned up the half rotted skull of the horse. There was a sour taste in my mouth. Cornelius Smith whimpered slightly at my elbow. ‘Didn’t I tell you the truth? Didn’t I say it was here?’
Ben looked at me as though enquiring what I now wished to do. It was something I had not considered: finding the animal was an end in itself. Disinterment seemed pointless. To know what had happened was enough, for the moment. I drew my own cloak across my lower face, shielding my nose from the smell as I looked down into the grave. Cornelius Smith pointed with a shaking finger, scared at what he had done, along with the horse-coopers who had come to his stable. There was a quaver in his voice, as he spoke, turning to me almost placatingly.
