Death Drops the Pilot

by George Bellairs

  The sky was clear blue with a few frothy white clouds riding high. In the distance, the hills north of Balbeck Bay, the close appearance of which, according to certain wiseacres, foretold early rain. The sweep of the coast with the tide out. In the distance Littlejohn could see the narrow estuary of the small river at Pullar’s Sands, which could be crossed on foot at the ebb. When the tide was in, you either went over by boat or walked inland to the bridge three miles up river. On the farther bank, the bulk of the inn stood out clearly. The Saracen’s Head was the oldest pub in the neighbourhood and originally owed its existence to the ferry.

  Dixon was digging in his garden and saluted Littlejohn as he passed.

  “Just taking part of my off-time gettin’ in the carrots. If it starts to rain, I’ve had it if I haven’t got ’em in.”

  “The pub at Pullar’s Sands, Dixon. Did Jumping Joe spend much time there? He seemed to be making for that direction whenever I saw him.”

  Dixon put his hands in the small of his back and pressed himself upright. He wasn’t as young as he used to be and digging stiffened him up. He looked in the direction of the Saracen’s Head with an inquiring glance as though he’d never seen it before. At the window behind him, the gallery of infants watched their father with eager expressions.

  “Yes, sir. Come winter, he’d sleep in one of the outhouses if it was too bad to stop outside in a hedge or a haystack. He got a lot of his mushrooms and rushes there and gathered sampire if anybody wanted it. He had to come this way to sell his stuff. There’s only the pub and an odd house or two at Pullar’s Sands.”

  “Did Captain Grebe ever get that way on his daily walks?”

  Dixon nodded.

  “Yes, sir. He used to go there quite a bit. But of late, I’ve not seen him makin’ in that direction. The nearest way’s along the sands when the tide’s out and then was when I’d see him.”

  “But he’s stopped his jaunts there lately?”

  “Within the last month or so.”

  “Why?”

  Dixon smiled a bit archly and coughed behind his hand.

  “Perhaps he was told to stay away, like. The landlady there, a Mrs. Liddell, is a bit of a queer one. She’s a widow of not much over forty and a good-looker, if you like ’em that way, sir.”

  “What way?”

  Dixon was growing red and Littlejohn felt that somehow the bobby’s modesty was bothering him.

  “A big, dark woman, like a gipsy. Her husband fell out of a loft and broke his neck. The place is a bit of a farm as well. She runs the farm and the public house. She doesn’t say much, but what she does say, she means.”

  Dixon’s mind was working hard to provide a satisfactory description of Mrs. Liddell.

  “If you was to call there now, sir, you’d as likely as not find ’er dressed in corduroy trousers and a blouse or a jumper with nothin’ on underneath it.”

  He looked round to see if his wife was listening and caught the eyes of the gallery of spectators at the window. He flapped his hand angrily at them and they all vanished.

  “H’m...They do say she’s not all she should be...ahem...if you know what I mean, sir.”

  Dixon’s eye caught Littlejohn’s in which there was an inquiring twinkle, and the bobby turned a dull red beneath his tan.

  “Is that what attracted John Grebe?”

  “Some say so. But he wasn’t the only one. They do say locally, she didn’t object to runnin’ two or three men at the same time.”

  “And then she showed Grebe the door?”

  “I don’t know, sir. The Saracen’s Head’s not on my beat, sir. The constable from Reddishaw village, through the woods behind Pullar’s Sands, goes there. He’s a decent chap and the father of four, but the one before ’im was said to call far too often at the Saracen and got himself moved on account of the scandal as went on.”

  Here Dixon coughed again and looked through the window to satisfy himself that his wife was still occupied at the oven.

  “I think I’ll take a stroll there, Dixon.”

  “Like me to come with you, sir?”

  It was obvious that Dixon was eager to make a trip of inquiry in the safe company of the Chief Inspector, and he took a step in the direction of his cottage to change from his gardening tunic into his new official rig-out.

  “Have you had your lunch?”

  “No, sir. But it’ll do after. I could regard the time with you as official, like, if you didn’t mind, and ’ave my dinner when we get back.”

  His expression reminded Littlejohn of that of his own dog, begging for her morning constitutional on Hampstead Heath.

  “All right, then.”

  As Littlejohn waited by the gate, he could see Dixon getting the rounds of the kitchen from his missus, who’d cooked hotpot and would now have to keep it warm whilst her spouse went gallivanting to the haunts of a woman who was socially ostracized by the decent matrons of Elmer’s Creek and district. They feared her, too, if they’d only been honest with themselves.

  Dixon eventually emerged with his ears burning and turned at the gate to wave a pacific hand and make a fawning gesture at his wife who, instead, nodded to Littlejohn and ignored her bobby.

  “Phew 1 If you don’t mind me confessin’ it, sir, the very mention of the Saracen’s ’Ead to the local married ladies is like Solemn and Jommorah. I told ’er I was only goin’ in the way of duty, but she carried on as if I might be on some evil purpose, sir...a journey of sejuction, as you might say.”

  They passed Fothergill, the postman, on his way to empty the boxes and Dixon straightened himself and threw back his shoulders to show he was officially collaborating with Scotland Yard.

  “Mornin’, Percy.”

  “How do, Albert. Mornin’, Chief Inspector, sir.”

  Fothergill emphasized his familiarity and disrespect for the bobby.

  “Hear you’ve had another murder, Albert. Comin’ to somethin’, isn’t it? Where were you, Albert, while Jumpin’ Joe was being knocked off?”

  The exchanges were made on the move and with the protagonists walking in opposite directions. Fothergill was out of earshot before Dixon could think of a suitable shaft in retaliation.

  “Gets a bit above himself, does Fothergill, sir. You’d think ’e owned the village since he married a woman fifteen years older than he is, for her money.”

  Satisfied that he had suitably stabbed the postman in the back, Dixon thereupon descended to the shore and showed Littlejohn the way they would take to Pullar’s Sands. It lay for two miles away along the tideline, littered with old cans, corks, spars of wood and seaweed. In the distance rose the squat scattered buildings of the Saracen’s Head, with smoke rising from one of the chimneys.

  They walked in silence for some time, Littlejohn taking in the lie of the surrounding land and the atmosphere of lonely desolation. The fields were flat as far as the eye could see and judging from the vegetation remaining after the autumn crops, yielded corn, potatoes and vegetables of all kinds. Shabby farms rose here and there, many of them surrounded by gaunt, twisted trees to protect them from the wind. Cattle were grazing in some of the pastures, and in places large wired sections held hundreds of chickens.

  But it was the feeling of isolation which Littlejohn felt most, as though this part of the country were cut off from the rest of civilization. A segregated community living its own life away from all the rest, with the ferry at Elmer’s Creek as a sort of bottleneck through which one and another of the people there entered the world outside.

  “This is a lonely spot, Dixon.”

  The bobby halted and looked around in the peculiar muddled way he had, suggesting that he was seeing something for the first time.

  “It was, sir, till the buses came and Elmer’s Creek got known for its good air and as a sort of little place for a nice quiet ’oliday.”

  “How long has the regular ferry been running?”

  “About fifty years, sir, but till just before the first war there weren’t as ma
ny trips across. Before the steam ferry, you ’ad to get a rowing-boat. All this area was called Adder’s Moss, and was right out of the world. I’ve ’eard the old people say some of ’em lived and died without ever going across the river. Just stayed here... on and on, forever, as you might say. Peshall was the village and Elmer’s Creek only sprung up on account of the river crossin’.”

  Littlejohn sat on the bank above the shore, a stretch of dry, fine turf with the narrow path they were travelling running along the top. He filled and lit his pipe and offered Dixon a cigarette.

  “Go on...Take it, Dixon. You’re really off duty.”

  The bobby helped himself and carefully lit the cigarette to avoid setting his moustache on fire.

  “Are you a native of these parts, Dixon?”

  “Who? Me, sir? No. I come from Clitheroe way, but I’ve been here fifteen years. My wife’s a native of Peshall. Lived on the little farm you can see over there to the left.”

  “So, you married and settled here by the grace of the county constabulary.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause.

  “How do you find the people here?”

  “I’m still a foreigner to them, sir, though with the wife bein’ native, it’s a bit easier. A clannish lot. Some of the locals, like Charlie Withers, Fothergill the postman and such, never took to me. Of course, bein’ a policeman makes a lot of people sort of reserved with you, doesn’t it?”

  “Fothergill’s a local, then?”

  “Oh, yes. Fothergills, Witherses, Bacons, Liddells. They’re all names on Adder’s Moss and have been ’ere for centuries. Queer folk. Till the district opened up a bit and let in strangers keepin’ boardin’ houses and pubs and charabancs, they all used to intermarry and there was a few village idiots and the like around. They married to keep the money in the family, like Fothergill did.”

  “Did he marry a relative?”

  “His cousin. She was a farmer’s widow and has plenty of money. Both Fothergill and his missus is past their fifties, so it doesn’t make any difference. Too late for children, if you see what I mean, sir.”

  “And Fothergill resents your intrusion?”

  “Yes. The old ones would rather ’ave one of themselves as constable. One of the clan. Fothergill, bein’ one of the old families from the moss, sort o’ prides himself on his official position and resents mine. He’s mad with pride.”

  “Sort of folie de grandeur, eh?”

  Littlejohn, watching Dixon closely, saw his eyes light up at this new and cutting diagnosis of Fothergill’s complaint, and then the brightness died away.

  “Beg pardon, sir.”

  “Now, come, Dixon, you knew what I said and what it meant. I’m not one of your official superiors and we’re just friends collaborating on a case. You’ve been decently educated, I can tell. All this playing at being ignorant is just a pose, isn’t it? All that about Solemn and Jommorah! You’ve heard the parson pronounce them at church and I’m sure you went to Sunday School in your younger days. And your dropping aitches and the like. The tone of your voice is educated and your illiteracy is just put on, isn’t it? Which school did you go to?”

  “Clitheroe Grammar.”

  Dixon sat with his head down closely concentrating on the glowing end of his cigarette.

  “If I’d let on I was educated, they’d have moved me, sir. I’d have got promoted and been shifted elsewhere. They think in the force I finished my education at the elementary school and I let ’em do it because it suits me.”

  “Why?”

  “My wife won’t leave the marsh. She says she’ll leave me, or rather I’ll have to leave her and go in digs if I get moved. That wouldn’t do, sir. The constabulary expect a man’s wife to go with him.”

  “Why won’t she go?”

  “She’s just a marshlander, that’s all. A lot of them are like trees, rooted here, and they die if they’re pulled up. Some can go away and prosper, but Margery, the missus, isn’t that sort.”

  “So you’ve screwed yourself down to the level of a...almost a peasant?”

  “If you like to put it that way. There’s the family. I couldn’t bear to part with them. Four of them.”

  “I only saw three.”

  “The eldest boy is away, training for the sea. He’s fifteen.”

  “You married as soon as you came here, then?”

  “Yes.”

  Dixon blushed and looked out to sea. Littlejohn guessed part of the story, but not all. That came later from Fothergill, in a burst of hilarious spite against his rival. Margery Withers...no near relation of Charlie the Cheat...had decided to become a policeman’s wife as soon as Dixon arrived in Peshall, and the girls of the marsh were not backward in getting their own way in the matrimonial direction. Dixon, lonely, an outcast among the natives, living in a damp cottage as lodger of an old woman before the police house was built, found the company of Margery, who kept popping up in various parts of his patrol, very comforting, and then very disturbing. The marsh girls were well known by the vulgar element of Falbright as “‘ot stuff”.

  When Dixon was called to Tim Withers’ little tumbledown farm, he thought it was for something constabulary and went with a smile. But he found an ultimatum waiting for him. There was a newcomer on the way and the old man wasn’t going to have it called Withers. Dixon, or...And the old reprobate had taken a gun down from a hook over the hearth. It was a good job Dixon loved the girl...or thought he did!

  “You should read Dr. Horrocks’s book, sir. People and Customs of Adder’s Moss. The doctor came here as a youngish man out of the navy. He doesn’t seem without money, and a good job, too. The marshlanders don’t bother much about doctors. Their old women cure their ailments with recipes handed down. And if they don’t cure...well...We’ve all got to die sometime, sir.”

  “Horrocks wasn’t successful?”

  “He might have been, in time, with the new generation as would go to doctors, comin’ on, and all this agricultural machinery doing people damage that a doctor’s needed for. But his book finished all that. They all took a dislike to him. Not that the bulk of ’em read the book, but it got round. There’s a doctor in Freckleby comes out here and they send for him, now that they haven’t to pay on account of the Health Insurance...”

  “What did Horrocks say about them?”

  “I won’t say he didn’t tell the truth for the most part. But it was the way he put it. You can’t object to him saying that the marsh people won’t mix with the fishermen or their girls marry them. It was and still is, with many families, like marrying a foreigner to marry a seagoin’ or a river man. But to say the women of the marsh had easy virtue and chose and seduced the men they wanted to marry...well, if it was true, it was badly put, that’s all. He also told how, to be sure they’d have somebody to pass on the money and land they owned, families often insisted on a child bein’ on the way before the couple got married. Well, that custom has died out. The doctor’s book brought the marshlanders into bad repute and they resented it.”

  “So, they used the old women instead of the doctor when they were ill!”

  “Yes. Or else sent to Freckleby and paid more.”

  Littlejohn looked out across the fields and could see the stocky, knotted forms of the men and women, harvesting the late vegetables or ploughing for autumn sowing. Already he’d noticed the twisted, rheumaticky old folk who came from the farms on the marsh, their dark swarthy features, their straight noses, and their black listless eyes which could probably grow passionate with hate or love or resentment. A strange, isolated race, dying out through the encroachment of motor traffic and modern ways. He was reminded of his recent summer holiday, spent with his friend Jerome Dorange, of the Sarete, at Nice. Together they had toured the harsh country around Digne and Lurs in Haute Provence, where the French detective had, on the spot, enlightened his English colleague on the Dominici affair.

  Isolated passionate people, so near to civilization, yet so primeval in hatred,
love of their soil, contempt for weakness, relentless vengeance, unbreakable family bonds and duties.

  “Do you think John Grebe fell foul of any of the marsh folk and brought their revenge on his head, Dixon?”

  The bobby paused and frowned.

  “I hope not, sir. They protect one another and you’ll get nothing out of any of them if they think you’re on the trail of one of their kin...and they’re all near or distant kin here. You saw how impudent Charlie the Cheat was when we spoke to him.”

  “What about Jumping Joe? Had he any ties on the marsh?”

  “Family ties, you mean? I wouldn’t be surprised. He turned up here one day years since and nobody knew where he came from. But some of the old people said he was an illegitimate son of some monied family and had been farmed out far away, and then had returned to his own place. I don’t know.”

  “He mentioned ghosts.”

  “That’s not uncommon here. They believe all kinds of funny things on the marsh. Old things die hard, sir, and this isn’t what you’d call Piccadilly Circus after dark. It’s lonely and damp and frightening, crawling with life...Rabbits, foxes, stoats, and ferrets gone wild, frogs, rats. Squealing, croaking, terrified, hunting...All going on together. I’ve had many a bad turn when out on late patrol in winter.”

  Littlejohn rose and knocked out his pipe on his heel.

  “This isn’t getting us to Pullar’s Sands, is it Dixon? But it’s all very interesting. It shows us what we’re up against.”

  They started off again in silence, Dixon wondering if he’d said too much, Littlejohn thinking of this strange little pocket of primitive and declining people among whom he found himself. A plane droned overhead on its way to Ireland.

  They reached the little stream which joined the sea at Pullar’s Sands. A narrow sheet of fresh water running down a sandy channel and across the sands where, when the tide came in, it would mingle with the sea. And the sea, in turn, would increase the size of the little tidal river beyond walking or wading depth and call for a boat or a journey to the bridge upstream.