by Ann Granger
He’d told himself this thought was unworthy and should be dismissed out of hand. It was preposterous. And yet he knew that the idea of marriage made her nervous. It had taken long enough to get her to say yes. He sighed. All he wanted was to pop over to the local registry office and sign on the dotted line. She had at long last declared herself willing to do the same. They were held up simply because they couldn’t find a house. Or not one they wanted to live in.
He jolted to a stop and peered through the windscreen. The road had run out. It shouldn’t have come as a shock. Back on the main highway, where the turning for Lower Stovey was marked, a large and prominently placed sign warned the traveller No Through Road. But the abruptness with which the surfaced road ended was still quite startling. Before him was a patch of rough grass and a gate. Beyond the gate lay the trees. In the silence and stillness, the years slipped away. Twenty, no, twenty-two, years ago. So long? Yet little had changed here. It wouldn’t take much to make the dark mass of trees seem scary, looming as it did over him, even without memory to colour his imagination. He remembered the first time he’d been here, at this very spot, and gazed at the same scene. The memory was so sharp, crystal-clear, it did indeed seem like yesterday and the emotion he felt hadn’t changed. He had never then, nor ever since, been anywhere which had so much inclined him – the most practical and in some ways unimaginative of men – to believe in magic. Not the beneficent magic of fairy godmothers and glass slippers, but the dark magic of lost arts and old gods.
The years between had passed with frightening speed. What on earth had possessed him to return to Lower Stovey? To view a possible property? Or the promptings of his sub-conscious, even a morbid curiosity or the old, fatal lure of unfinished business? When he’d seen the police car pass by on its way to the woods, his pulse had raced and he’d felt the thrill of the chase and something more, a twinge of something like anticipation, even hope. Hope that an old secret would at long last be revealed. Was it possible, he asked himself, that after so long the Potato Man was back?
Markby had been no stranger to the general area even twenty-two years earlier. He’d known the old drovers’ way, even walked it with a couple of friends as a teenager. He was aware it passed through the woods. But Lower Stovey itself, that had been a new place to him, and he’d been brought here by the Potato Man.
Markby had then been a newly-promoted inspector, as his junior colleague Dave Pearce was now. Like Dave, his new rank had sat uneasily on his shoulders like a new coat. He’d been anxious to distinguish himself and determined not to make any mistakes. His superintendent had been Pelham, elderly, wily as an old dog-fox, resentful of his approaching retirement.
‘There’s no shame in making a mistake,’ he’d told Markby, ‘provided you learn by it. It’s only if you go on making the same mistakes and never learn that you ought to be asking yourself if you’re in the right job.’
As it turned out he’d made mistakes a-plenty over the intervening years but he still didn’t believe he’d made any on that case, not that he could think of, looking back. Yet even doing everything right, by the book, hadn’t produced success. Perhaps he’d been too young and inexperienced to dare to throw away the book and strike out on a line of his own. He sighed as another memory was dredged up.
Also like Dave, Markby had been newly-wed at the time. He hoped Dave’s marriage lasted longer than his had done. But he thought it probably would. Dave and Tessa gave every sign of being a well-matched couple who would survive the stormy seas of marriage’s early years. Unlike Rachel and himself. Their boat had sunk practically in the first gale.
Yet here he was seeking to be married again, married to Meredith. What made him think that, having failed so dismally at the first attempt, he’d do better the second time around? Perhaps only the memory of Superintendent Pelham and his homespun wisdom. Markby hoped he had learned by his mistakes. Perhaps even in the matter of marriage practice made perfect.
Stovey Woods and the Potato Man, the first case handed entirely to him in his new rank. ‘See what you can make of this, Alan,’ Pelham had rumbled. ‘The blighter’s got to be caught.’
But, to Markby’s great dismay, they didn’t catch him. He’d chalked up a failure on his very first case. Talk about omens. Luckily, he’d not been superstitious, though he had wondered if some jinx haunted Stovey Woods and not just the Potato Man. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t mentioned being here before to Meredith. He associated his previous visit with a bitterly felt sense of having been outmanoeuvred by a mind more cunning than his own.
Over the years he’d tried to console himself whenever his thoughts turned back to that case, as they persisted in doing from time to time, despite everything. He told himself those had been the days before DNA revolutionised the way the police went about identifying the criminal. Nor had offender profiling yet reached out beyond metropolitan areas. Given these weapons, which now everyone took for granted, he might have got his man.
For the Potato Man had been a serial rapist. They didn’t know how many victims he’d had because, as is the way in such cases, they only knew of the women who’d come forward. Again, twenty-two years ago, women had been more hesitant to tell their story, fearing unsympathetic police officers and a society which was inclined to blame the victim rather than the perpetrator. ‘What was she doing, wandering about up in those woods on her own?’ had been many people’s response on hearing of a new victim. The lack of cooperation on the part of the very people who should most have wanted the rapist caught, the villagers themselves, had been one of the most frustrating aspects of the whole case.
The first victim the police had known about was a girl called Mavis Cotter, described in popular parlance as ‘a bit simple’. Getting her story out of her hadn’t been easy. Her vocabulary was limited and she had been in deep shock. She wasn’t used to answering questions of any kind and she could neither read nor write with any competence. As her tale emerged over several frustrating interviews, she’d gone to the woods because there were blackberry bushes on the outskirts. She’d worked her way round to the far side and decided to cut home through the woods as being the quickest way.
She hadn’t heard him. She hadn’t seen him. Without warning something had been thrown over her head and trapped her arms. The only detail she could give was that she’d noticed an earthy smell. At first they hadn’t paid too much attention to that because after all, lying on the woodland floor, she might be expected to smell earth. There had even been some who’d questioned that any of this had happened as Mavis told it, suggesting that Mavis had agreed to intercourse but taken fright afterwards and made up the story of the attack.
But Markby had been inclined to believe her because he didn’t think Mavis had the mental agility to think up her story or to stick to it once she’d told it, and she certainly had answers to any sceptical questions (when you eventually got them out of her).
Why had no cloth or covering been found at the place she said the rape took place? Because he’d taken it with him. Then why had she not seen him as he ran away? Because he’d pushed her face down into the leafmould and told her not to move or he’d kill her. His voice had been gruff, sounded funny. She hadn’t recognised it. Terrified, she’d remained lying there for some time, she didn’t know how long, before getting the courage to look up, see she was alone, and run home. Also he’d stolen her necklace. Just a string of cheap beads but it had been Mavis’s pride and joy and she’d wept as much for them as for her lost virginity – the implication of the last had not come home to her. Had she not just lost the beads, unaware the string broken? No, insisted Mavis tearfully. He pulled the necklace from her and it had hurt her throat as the string broke. Marks on her neck seemed to bear this out. Nevertheless, the villagers of Lower Stovey had generally been of the opinion that you couldn’t believe anything Mavis Cotter told you because she wasn’t right in the head and never had been. Only the girl’s mother had insisted her daughter had been violated.
They
had, however, been obliged to believe Jennifer Fernley the second victim. Jennifer had been a student and a keen walker. She’d started off to walk the Bamford way with a friend but early on the friend had twisted her ankle and dropped out. Jennifer had walked on alone. She had been passing through Stovey Woods, keeping to the marked track, when attacked. She had heard running feet behind her. What kind of running feet? Oh, not a light athletic run, more a heavy clumsy galumphing along. She’d half turned to see who it was, been aware only of a dark shape, and then he had thrown something like a sack over her head, blinding her and trapping her arms. It had smelled earthy. After the attack, he’d pushed her head into a bramble thicket, leaving her face a mass of bleeding scratches, and ordered her not to move or she’d die. His voice had been gruff and peculiar. And he’d stolen something from her. Her wristwatch.
‘The bloke’s a collector,’ said old Pelham on being informed of this. ‘He takes something from his victims as a souvenir. He’s probably got a box full of trinkets at home and takes ’em out of an evening and gets off again, handling them.’
It was Markby who had suggested that what might have been thrown or pulled over the victims’ heads could have been a potato sack, accounting for the earthy smell. After that, the Press had called the rapist the Potato Man. Some joker had even drawn a sketch and pinned it on the wall of the incident room. The drawing had shown a headless oval body with stick arms and legs, eyes, nose and mouth drawn in the centre of the oval. Above it was printed WANTED. Markby, angry, had torn it down.
So that was how he’d come to pay his call on the Reverend Pattinson, vicar of Lower Stovey. He’d been forewarned that Pattinson was a scholarly sort of fellow, a bit out of his time, in Markby’s informant’s opinion. The type happy to live among his books and take a couple of services of a Sunday and more suited to an eighteenth-century parsonage than a twentieth century one. Nevertheless, as Markby had soon discovered, Pattinson had had firm ideas about his flock and refused even to consider a rapist might be among them. They were all family men, respectable to the core, he insisted. The village was small. Everyone knew everyone else. If there was a violent psychopath living among them, someone would know.
In vain, Markby had pointed out that someone generally did know. They just didn’t tell. He also drew the vicar’s attention to the description they’d had of the attacker’s voice: gruff, funny, peculiar, ‘like an animal’s, if an animal could talk’, said one village woman, the third victim. It was Markby’s opinion this indicated the attacker had disguised his voice and why would he do that unless he feared it would be recognised, either then or at a later date?
The vicar was adamant. Whoever the attacker was, he wasn’t a Lower Stovey man. Many people walked the old drovers’ way. Besides the hikers, there were tramps, New Age hippies, gypsies, wanderers of all kinds. The police should be looking among these.
There had been two more reported rapes after that, one another village woman, the other a young woman cyclist on the old way who had stopped at the woods to answer a call of nature. In the first case, the Potato Man had taken a single pearl clip earring and in the second, a copper bracelet.
And then he’d gone to ground. There had been no more rapes. The Potato Man passed into local legend, become unreal except in the memory of his victims and in the minds of the police who knew they’d lost him. Perhaps the Reverend Pattinson had been right and the man had been a wanderer who had set up some temporary home in the woods and then, when police investigations grew intrusive, had moved on. As abruptly as he’d appeared, the Potato Man had vanished.
Markby stirred in the cramped confines of the car seat and dragged his mind back to the present. He could see the police car parked on the grass, but there wasn’t a soul about. Had the officers gone into the woods like the kids in the fairy-tale and were unable to find their way out? No friendly woodcutter around here to rescue anyone. Who was he, anyway, in those stories, that woodcutter? asked Markby of himself as his mind made a lateral leap. What did he represent? A woodland spirit almost certainly. And the Potato Man, what had he been?
He got out of the car and found his feet sinking into soft ground. The trees still dripped the recent rain. He squelched forward, his shoes collecting a thick clagging of mud.
As he reached the gate he heard voices and three figures emerged from the dark regiment of pines. Two were in uniform, the third mishapen by a large hump bulging on his back and clad in startling yellow.
They met up by the gate. He let them through and then held up his ID. ‘Blimey, Superintendent,’ said one of the patrolmen in awe. ‘They sent you out here for this?’
‘No,’ he told them. ‘I was in the village and saw you go past. It’s just curiosity on my part. What have you got there?’
The uniformed man was carrying a badly-wrapped package suggesting a fish and chip supper which it manifestly wasn’t. He looked down at it. ‘Bones, sir.’ He began to open it up carefully.
Markby recognised the paper as a crumpled ordnance survey map. The man held it out to him. A jumble of brownish objects nestled in the cup formed by the officer’s hands and he could see one of them was a jawbone. Markby fought to keep his face free of expression. Could these be the bones of the lost rapist – or of one of his victims? Had one of them raised her head and seen him and met death?
‘Pretty old,’ he said. Yes, lying bare for twenty years or more at least. He looked at the young man in the yellow waterproof and made a guess. ‘Did you find them, sir?’
‘Yes,’ returned the young man. ‘I fell down a slope and there they were.’
‘This gentleman is Dr Morgan,’ explained the other officer. ‘Being a medical man he knew what they were. We had a look round, just in the area where they were found. We couldn’t find any more, not just in a quick search.’
‘I’ll see someone gets out here and has a better look.’ Markby glanced at the woodland. ‘But it will be difficult to search the whole wood.’
‘Pity you didn’t leave them where you found them, sir,’ said the other officer to the young man in the yellow cape. ‘You are sure you took us back to the right spot?’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Dr Morgan testily. ‘You saw for yourself the marks where I rolled down the slope. I didn’t leave them there because something might have moved them before you got here. I couldn’t stay with them. I told you, the mobile didn’t work in there and anyway, you’d never have found me. I had to come out here and wait for you.’
‘Well, you’d better come with us and make a statement,’ said the first officer. He cast a slightly apprehensive glance at Markby.
‘Thank you for reporting your find, Doctor,’ Markby said to him politely. ‘Spoiled your hike, I expect.’
‘No sweat,’ said the other with gloomy resignation. ‘This walking break has been pretty well jinxed from the start.’
‘Stovey Wood is an unlucky place,’ Markby replied and the other three looked at him, startled.
They parted company. Dr Morgan divested himself of his yellow cape, revealing the hump to be a rucksack which he unslung before climbing into the back of the police car. Alan returned to his car, opened it up and leaned in to take out a newspaper. He spread a layer of sheets on the car floor. He wasn’t a finicky person but there was no point in making work. He scraped some of the mud off by rubbing his sole on a tussock, sighed and clambered in behind the wheel.
Their small convoy set off, lurching back down the potholed track to the village. As they reached the church, Markby tapped his horn to let the men ahead know he was leaving them there. He pulled up by a lych-gate and watched the police car until it was out of sight.
Chapter Three
Ruth Aston perched unhappily on a rickety stepladder, cleaning Sir Rufus Fitzroy’s memorial with a bright green feather duster.
The Fitzroy monument, as the leaflet giving the church’s history called it, gave the impression of having been an expensive piece of sculpture in its day. The leaflet, however, repeated the t
ale that the sculptor had been down on his luck and done the work for a song. He’d been an Italian who’d arrived in Britain hoping for commissions from wealthy patrons. He had been reduced to making nymphs and satyrs for landscaped gardens when asked, almost in passing, if he couldn’t produce a suitable memorial for a gentleman. Nevertheless, the result was one of the tourist attractions of Lower Stovey’s parish church, in as much as it had any. Architecturally, it was no different to a host of other late medieval churches. It had lost its original stained glass when Cromwell’s soldiers knocked it out with Puritan zeal. They’d pulled down its carved statues of the saints on the façade and smashed them. The only one left was one they couldn’t reach, an unknown bishop high on the west front where nothing could get at him but the jackdaws.
The Victorians, with their own brand of pious hooliganism, had remodelled the chancel, taken out the fourteenth-century font and replaced it with a Gothic-style version by a follower of Pugin. They had also taken out the eighteenth-century boxpews and put in oak benches nowadays occupied by, at best, a congregation of fifteen souls on a good Sunday. The villagers, both indigenous and late-comers, weren’t religious and the weekend visitors, second-home owners, spent their Sunday mornings soaking up rural atmosphere in the village pub and their afternoons getting ready for the drive back to London.
In these circumstances, Lower Stovey no longer warranted its own priest or even a weekly service. It got whoever could be spared from duties at other churches in the area on a monthly rota, though technically it was in the care of Father Holland at Bamford.
But its church did have a few interesting features and Ruth, who had made it her task to dust them off from time to time, knew them intimately.
