Walls of Silence: a stunning historical thriller you won't be able to put down

by Ruth Wade

  The walk to the bar was a short one and she only stumbled slightly on the way back. The pub had got busy without her noticing. Some commercial travellers were sitting with their cases by their chairs as they wrote notes in fat books held together with rubber bands; small clusters of market traders compared business with one another over glasses of beer.

  Her father had never been much of a one for drinking, a sherry at Christmas or a bottle of stout on the rare occasions he had to take to his bed with a cold or a touch of something he called phlegmatic melancholia. However, whatever his temporary incapacity, he would still go through her calculus and attempts at solving algebraic equations and give her the number of crosses she had to write up on the chart on the wall in the drawing room. Never the ticks – maybe they were too infrequent to be worth mentioning – but always the faults. Her faults. Her shortcomings. Her inability to be who he wanted her to be.

  It really was getting awfully hot now. She could feel the flush on her face and the unpleasant way her blouse was sticking to her skin. As she shrugged her arms out of the sleeves of her coat she banged her elbow on the table. A slick of whisky lurched out of the glass. She dipped her finger in and licked it. Her gaze caught the feet of a group of men dripping little pools of water on the floor.

  Was it raining outside? When had that happened? She tried to look up to see out of the window but her head felt too heavy. She picked up her drink and swirled the ice around. Things had changed. It was no longer cuboid in shape; no longer transparent either, it now had a misty graininess at the centre. Most of the structure had broken down and it could realistically no longer be called ice. What must it feel like to drip and drain away like that? To become something other than what you started out to be, other than what everyone thought you were? She giggled when she realised the illogicality of the questions. How could ice know? Where were its nerve-endings and brainstem and capacity to feel? She giggled again loudly causing someone nearby to aim a comment at her. She stared rudely back.

  But then she felt it. She felt cold and wet and disintegrating. She felt herself melting. Diminishing. She knew she was becoming no more. She sensed the edges of her being flooding out from where she sat and wanted to do nothing to stop it. It felt good. She was loose and free and a part of everything around her.

  She was drunk.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  PC Billings had been diverted from his business of last Thursday by a bit of bother over a missing cat. Then his time had got itself taken up with an appearance at Lewes Crown Court over an arrest for badger-baiting he’d made five months back, and enough paperwork to make his brain boil. But with the new week stretching out before him he could at last take up the cudgel again of having that word with the parents of the latest crop of rascals. It didn’t seem like the blink of a gnat’s eye since he’d been doing the same when the grown-ups were themselves no more than nippers. It made him feel old right enough. Like one of the oak trees at the back of Giblets Gibson’s slaughterhouse. But it made him feel good too. Fletching may be a no-account place to those passing on the London road but it was his little world to keep on the straight and narrow.

  He stopped at the pump for a drink before checking his notebook. Six down, only Alfie Thresher to go. He’d been keeping him until last. He wouldn’t put it past him for there to be a grain of truth behind Edith Potter’s imaginings of stones on windows if the boy was involved in the churchyard hauntings. Made from different stuff to the others he was. A proper little ringleader – but also not afraid to go out on pranks of his own. Like the time he set a bucket of what could’ve been anything from ditch water to horse’s piss over the haberdashery’s back door when the sun was shining strong enough to need such things left open. Ada Wicklow had come into the Police House dripping and smelling like nothing you’d want in a place with such small windows, screaming that all the kiddies – and some of the regulars down the Barley Mow come to that – should be birched or, better still, hanged. He’d had to work hard not to smile. It was common knowledge that Ma Wicklow had a taste for cuffing small boys around the head for no cause anyone could see, and marching them down here to the pump for a good dousing if she had a mind. Sometimes, despite the uniform, he couldn’t help reckoning that justice was best served by those who were doing scant more than repaying.

  However, all that aside, if the boy had been tormenting a sad and lonely spinster for no other reason than she was a bit odd then it was an entirely different kettle of fish. He didn’t hold with that sort of thing at all. Didn’t bode well for the future, see. Scallywags grew up into toerags and he had to nip this in the bud before the tyke started getting up to the sort of mischief that would have him turning up in front of the magistrates on a regular basis. A man of the law – even one who believed in smoothing over rather than firing up – would then have far more on his hands than a little monkeying around the Potter place.

  But the Threshers lived right up at the top of Five Mile Hill. Like as not they wouldn’t be in anyway; the father was a carter on the run into Lewes, and Florence ... well, she was oft times visiting her mother over at Cowden – although he suspected blood wasn’t nearly so thick as a shared taste for gin in that arrangement. Perhaps he could save his boot leather and pay a visit to Treadwell instead. Alfie worked there as a delivery boy of a Saturday and maybe the threat of the holding back of a tanner or two for upsetting a valued customer would go further than a half-baked dressing down by parents who shouldn’t be allowed to raise chickens, let alone a headstrong boy.

  *

  Ernest Treadwell slammed the till drawer shut. ‘Afternoon, Paul. What can I do you for? I’m fresh out of cheese if that’s what you’re wanting. I know you’re partial. Delivery tomorrow.’

  PC Billings flicked off his chinstrap and placed his helmet on the counter. ‘No need to be putting some by, thanks all the same. Mrs Billings has gone into Uckfield and will pick some up there. I’ll tell you what though. I couldn’t half do with a mustard soak. Boots pinching me summat rotten. Worst torture known to man, sore feet.’

  ‘I’ve a kettle on. Come on through. I’ll have a bowl and a pinch of Colman’s ready by the time you’ve undone your laces. Just don’t go telling everyone or I’ll have nought in here but the walking wounded.’

  He held up his incomplete hands and Paul flashed back the expected response.

  He was still smiling when he was sitting on a chair in the back room pulling his socks off.

  ‘You’re looking more like your old self, Ern, been a bit peaky of late if you don’t mind me saying. I ain’t hardly seen you looking happier than you do now since they took sugar off the ration. Business picking up is it?’ He lowered his feet into the steaming water. At the tinkling of the shop bell, Ernest Treadwell left him and went to see to his customer. When he returned, he put the kettle back on the range and pulled a couple of cups off the hooks under the shelf beside the mantelpiece.

  ‘Fancy a cuppa? I’ll not be offering summat stronger because it’s early yet and we’ve both still a job to do, but if you’re out doing your rounds come suppertime then pop in and I’ll have a drop for you. Traveller left me a bottle of good brandy the other week on account of me taking some unwanted goods off his hands.’

  A wavelet of water lapped over the edge of the bowl as Paul Billings came to life and sat up.

  ‘I hope you ain’t going to tell me summat you shouldn’t: once a policeman, always a policeman, even without the boots on.’

  Ernest Treadwell flushed and Paul felt a little guilty. Mrs Billings was always telling him that he shouldn’t be forever seeing the criminal in everyone, but he was of a mind that it was his habit of doing just that kept the villagers of Fletching on their toes. Unlike him. Right now he’d swap his feet for Ern’s stumpy hands any day of the week.

  He watched the grocer fill the pot with boiling water, then tuck the top of the newly opened packet of leaves over on itself.

  ‘Here, take this,’ he said as he pushed it across the t
able, ‘best quality. The champagne of teas – from Formosa – can’t get it around here for neither love nor money. From my own special supplier; I’ll not see you go short.’

  Paul accepted the gift with a nod. Ernest stirred the pot, brought it over and poured them both a pale amber cupful. He splashed the milk in then spooned out heaps of sugar.

  ‘I know you ain’t just come in for my company – you being a busy man an’ all – don’t tell me someone’s been mouthing off about the quality of my merchandise. Because they won’t get better anywhere else.’ He slurped at his tea.

  ‘Come on, Ern, you know I ain’t one to be wasting my time listening to tittle-tattle over a stone in a sack of spuds. No, I’m on the lookout for sorting something that’s likely to be causing an awful lot more trouble if it’s left to run its course. There’s some in this village who see it as their business to go scaring others out of their wits and that ain’t right – however thin the hold in the first place.’

  ‘So what do you be wanting from me, then?’

  ‘Just keep your eyes skinned for anything that Alfie Thresher might be getting up to. And maybe put a stop to his delivering to those folks down by the church. It’s him I reckon at the bottom of causing Miss Potter to be in and out of the Police House like a whipped top. I don’t want you going taking the law into your own hands mind – no offence, Ern – but that’d be like me taking it on myself to re-stack all your shelves. And Mrs Billings won’t even let me loose in the larder.’

  He laughed to make sure the message was taken as meant: from one responsible citizen to another. He picked up the towel beside the bowl and began to dry his feet. Ernest Treadwell sucked on his ill-fitting false teeth.

  ‘I’ll be telling him when he’s next in that I’ll have him on the bacon if he can’t be trusted to be out there on shop errands without getting up to no good.’

  Paul paused in the lacing of his boots. Ernest Treadwell had been terrifying two generations of village nippers into nightmares with how he’d lost his fingers when he used to have the slicer in the back room and had got himself distracted for a moment, he loved to see their faces sicken and their mouths open as he waved his stumps at them. The truth was that it’d been his bad luck to be given a faulty Mills bomb grenade during army training. There was no accounting for the depth of black in some people.

  ‘You be putting the word out if you will that he’s to know we’re watching him. No more than that.’ He stood up. ‘Wilf still got the vicar paying him as sexton?’

  ‘Ain’t got the push yet as I know of, even though anyone with his head not in the Bible can see he can’t be relied on to dig a grave in the right place.’

  ‘Then I’ll be off to be telling him to pull down any tree camps or the like might have been built in the churchyard; children can’t be skulking where they shouldn’t be if there’s nowhere to hide. Be seeing you, Ern. Thanks for the tea – wet and dry.’

  He chortled at yet another of his spontaneous jokes and set the bell above the shop door tinkling.

  *

  Wilf Drayton wasn’t in when he called. PC Billings knew that straight off because the man’s geese were making their usual racket out back and there was no evidence of his evil – and lingering – pipe tobacco. He’d a good mind to tell him that smoking that stuff was illegal and he knew for a fact that he stole Miss Potter’s rose petals to mix with it. Blamed it on the geese, right enough, but he’d seen him do it with his own eyes.

  Paul looked across at the garden next door. It was unusually dishevelled with only one bed half-dug and the rest nests of weeds. Miss Potter normally kept a good length and it was achingly sad to see it in such a state. Her bedroom curtains were drawn. He had just decided that he’d leave her in peace – though how she could sleep with all that honking – and come back another day, when the front door was thrown open and Edith Potter, in a saggy baggy cardigan all buttoned-up skew-whiff, staggered out of her cottage and down the path.

  ‘I’ve been robbed!’

  PC Billings jumped over the hedge and took her by the arm before she fell down. ‘Officer, I’ve been robbed, arrest them, arrest them.’

  ‘Now who exactly would that be?’

  Paul spoke quietly with the calm voice that he knew distressed persons liked to hear.

  ‘The man who did it, of course.’

  Her hysteria was mounting and Paul had to work hard to remind himself that Miss Potter could not be made to snap out of it sharply like one of the Barley Mow regulars when they were on about some imagined slight over a game of darts.

  ‘You just be telling me from the beginning what is missing and where from.’

  ‘My money. They’ve stolen my money. I went for a little rest and when I came downstairs my mackintosh was on the floor and I knew someone had been through my pockets.’

  For the first time, Paul Billings caught the tang of something stale and unpleasant. Had she perhaps been at the drinks cabinet and taken a medicinal drop too many?

  ‘Ten shillings. I had a ten-shilling note on me this morning and now it’s gone.’

  ‘Do you think maybe it could be lying dropped somewhere?’

  ‘I haven’t been out of the house.’

  But that couldn’t be right. Paul had seen her sitting at the back of the Uckfield bus when he’d been waving Mrs Billings off. Maybe whatever Edith Potter was afflicted with was causing her such upsetment that she was forgetting what she’d been about. He’d make it his business to pop by tomorrow and call up the doctor for her if she wasn’t out and about and lambasting Wilf Drayton over something and nothing.

  ‘Well, there ain’t a lot I can be doing to look into where he’s got to now; I can’t be whistling and eating flour at the same time, and I’m up to my neck after having a word about the knockings you say you’ve been hearing in the night. Although it must be said that I’m still not altogether sure it weren’t that tree of yours playing tricks.’

  Edith Potter pulled herself up straight and wrenched her arm free. ‘If you won’t do anything about finding the thief then it’s about time this village had a policeman who will. I shall be writing to the Commissioner concerning your gross dereliction of duty in this matter. And while I’m at it I’ll make sure he knows about all the other heinous crimes that have been perpetrated right under your nose.’

  She took a tentative step back towards her front door.

  ‘Including the public disorder caused by those diabolical geese. I’ve a raging headache and thanks to your neglect it’s getting worse by the second; why don’t you just take a shotgun and shoot the whole fucking lot of them?’

  Paul Billings couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d heard the vicar blaspheme. Perhaps her affliction was a touch more than a gippy tummy after all.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Saturday came around much sooner than Edith expected. Any sense of time passing had been lost in a blur of sleeping and waking but the oblivion must’ve done her good because she felt very rested. Quite like her old self in fact. So much so that she was seized by the urge to sort out her life. She’d make a start on tackling the piles of things that were perching everywhere. It was as if she came into the cottage and left whatever she was carrying on the first available surface. Just when she’d managed to acquire such a slovenly habit she couldn’t say. Neither could she explain why she hadn’t noticed the chaos before. But, no matter, it had been brought to her attention now and would be rectified forthwith.

  At the top of the stairs, she stepped over a cushion that had somehow ended up on the landing. Only her room would need attention because she never went in the other one. She’d locked it the minute they’d taken the body away and put the key in a place she was pleased to have forgotten. There were some benefits in having a mind too full to contain the trivial.

  Her bed was strewn with books and National Geographic magazines. She gathered them up and placed them on the dresser. Newspapers littered the floor. Three trips out to the dustbin at the back and they we
re gone. She’d been shocked to see that the earliest was dated over a year ago; what good had she thought it’d do to hold onto it? All the events of those days were long gone. Dead and buried, you might say. A second cushion was wedged between the washstand and the wall; she suspected she had brought it up so she could sit and read in bed. Underneath was a box of men’s handkerchiefs. They couldn’t be her father’s, surely? His name had been Gerald and these were monogrammed with the letter M. It was one mystery amongst the many others in this house and didn’t warrant any more thought than where it was to go. She picked the box up and slipped it into her pinafore pocket. A quick look around the room, a tweak of the counterpane and then, with her arms full of stray cushions, Edith made her way downstairs to face the far more daunting task of clearing the accumulation of unwanted and displaced possessions from the parlour.

  It was lunchtime before she allowed herself a break. She needed a cup of tea. The dust and fluff that seemed to have come out of nowhere had irritated her nose and set off a number of sneezing fits that had in turn aggravated her sinuses. She filled the kettle and slid it over the hotplate on the range. Lighting the fire was the first thing she’d done on waking and it only needed a quick prod with the poker and a smattering of fresh coke for it to begin to burn strongly. There wouldn’t be too long to wait.

  She sat at the kitchen table and lifted her feet up onto the chair opposite, sighing as her calf muscles relaxed and flattened themselves against the cool wood. The kettle began to whistle softly and she rested her eyes for a moment.