The walls and many display stands showed the pictures to good advantage and in fact, two more pictures were presented to her at her birthday party, having been found by an old lady still living in the village. Afterwards, the exhibition remained on display for a month, with coffee and refreshments being sold and the public being charged an entrance fee to view it.
I popped in from time to time, both to inspect the pictures and to show my uniform as a means of giving some protection with the occasional piece of advice about their security, but Gilbert had done a good job. None of the photos had been harmed in any way.
On the day before the exhibition was due to close, I popped in and found he was alone. He offered me a coffee which I accepted.
“It’s been a good exhibition, Nick, we’ve created immense interest about the village history, with the school kids doing a project. At the time, the school kids had a grandstand view of the flood, and besides, lots of visitors and locals want to know more. Beatrice’s collection has worked magic for us, the hall’s benefited too, the extra income’s very useful.”
“So what happens to the photographs next?”
“They will be returned to Beatrice.”
“But she’s not getting any younger,” I commented, echoing the thoughts of many. “It’s a pity these couldn’t become a permanent exhibition, either here or somewhere else.”
“She’s frightened of losing them, she’s spent a lifetime gathering them and always maintains the collection is not complete. Just when we think there’s no more photographs left anywhere on this globe, someone finds another and gives it to her. She’s terrified that just one gets lost or damaged. She has insisted she gets them back and she agreed to us having them until tomorrow. I had a devil of a job persuading her to release them at all for this exhibition so I don’t want to squeeze any more concessions out of her. The fact that she got another two photos for her collection has helped her to come to terms with this public viewing, so the chance of others being discovered might influence her to allow more exhibitions.”
“So what’s their long-term future?” I pressed him.
“When she dies, they go to her son. He’s in Australia, but I understand he’s thinking of returning to England to retire. He’ll be well on his way to sixty now and must soon be thinking of retirement.”
“So what’ll he do with them?”
“Dunno, unless Beatrice imposes a condition or makes some stipulation in her will.”
“It would be a crying shame if they got lost or dispersed after all her efforts.” I sipped the coffee. “I just hope her son knows what to do with them. They could become a permanent exhibition here, or at one of the local museums or libraries.”
“That’s what we told Beatrice; we asked if she would leave them to the village, or even to a local museum, but she is determined to leave them to Thomas. She’s made that abundantly clear, Nick, she seems to think that a family interest will safeguard the collection, but lots of people have been pestering her about their future. One antique dealer made a huge offer for the lot, well over a thousand pounds, but she refused. We had others in too, all making noises about buying the collection; a photographer came and he offered to reproduce them for sale, giving her a royalty on every one he sold — she refused him, too. Mind, it shows that some folks realize how valuable the whole collection is. It’s unique, in fact.”
“And don’t forget it’s her lifetime’s work,” I added.
I left Gilbert when a car-load of visitors arrived, taking a last lingering look at the photographs as I walked out.
Two days later when I popped into the hall, it was deserted as it awaited the annual Elsinby Show of Vegetable Produce and Crafts. Beatrice had got her precious photographs back and her collection was still intact.
It would be several months later when sad news reached Elsinby. Beatrice’s son, Thomas, had died suddenly in Australia and before his death, he had expressed a wish to be buried in Elsinby. His death and eventual funeral in the village resurrected all the interest in Beatrice’s collection of photographs because, if her son and heir was dead and gone, who would now inherit her collection?
It bothered Gilbert Kingston who tried to talk to her about it once her period of mourning was over, but it also energized a host of antique dealers, photographers, journalists, writers and other collectors, all of whom began to visit the village in the hope of persuading Beatrice to part with her collection. But she steadfastly refused and gave no indication of her wishes for the eventual disposal of the photographs.
Before I left Aidensfield, Beatrice went into a decline and was taken to a private nursing home in York. A friend from Elsinby looked after the house and made sure that her precious collection of photographs was not harmed or removed, but within six months, Beatrice had died. None of us knew the fate of the photographs, but when her will was published, we learned she had done the right thing.
She had left them to the village school, asking that they form a permanent exhibition upon its walls in memory of her own recollection of the flood from that very place. She did add a proviso that a body of three trustees be formed to care for the collection in perpetuity and that they be given the authority to arrange external exhibitions in the village hall, or in such other place as they deemed suitable, any proceeds being shared between the village hall and the trustees, the trustees to use their share for maintenance of the collection. Reproductions could be permitted and any royalties accruing should be paid for the benefit of the school.
She wanted any income to be utilized to buy books and other educational aids. The collection was to be known as the Beatrice Wintergill Collection.
It is still providing much-needed funds for Elsinby Primary School and a further seven photographs have been added since her death. The last one to be received shows Beatrice as a six-year-old girl; she is standing outside the school gazing at the floodwaters as they swirl around the village.
This was the one picture she never found; I think this was the missing one, the one which drove her to hunt for every possible photograph. But not a single other photograph has been discovered since that time.
With the picture of Beatrice, aged six, gazing upon the floodwaters from the school, the Beatrice Wintergill Collection is now complete. She would be pleased about that.
6. Men of Dubious Ability
Tis God gives skill,
But not without men’s hands:
He could not make Antonio Stradivari’s violins
Without Antonio.
MARY ANN EVANS (GEORGE ELIOT), 1819–80
One fine spring morning as I was walking down the village street in Aidensfield in full uniform, I heard a strange sound. It was rather like a stone hitting metal, something akin to a pebble being propelled with great force at a tin can or even thrown up by the tyre of a passing car to strike a roadside direction sign.
Puzzled, I looked around and almost immediately noticed that the weather-vane on the tower of the parish church was spinning wildly. Something had struck it with considerable force and I wondered if it was one of the village youths testing his skills with an air rifle — the vane, in the shape of a cockerel, was far too high and far too remote from the road to have been hit by a pebble thrown up by a passing car. I saw no one and heard nothing further; the weather-vane was still intact and from my vantage point did not appear to have suffered any damage, so I resumed my patrolling.
Although puzzled by this, I did not consider it worthy of further investigation until a couple of days later.
A similar incident happened when I was talking to George Ward outside his pub. Before our very eyes, a starling suddenly toppled from its perch on the rim of a chimney-pot just along the street.
“Somebody’s shot it!” cried George as the stricken bird landed on the pavement with a thud.
“I didn’t hear any shots,” I commented as I went forward for a closer look.
The bird was dead and a trickle of blood oozed from its nostrils and beak, but there
was no outward sign of injury. It hadn’t been shot. There was no indication that it had been struck by either air-gun pellets, shotgun pellets or a rifle bullet; it looked as if it had been stunned.
“That’s bloody funny,” said George, and I then told him about the weather-vane. Standing where I was, it was easy to see that if someone had been responsible for both actions, the missiles had come from roughly the same area. I popped the dead starling into a waste-bin and went on my way.
In the days that followed, I heard of several similar incidents, all minor in their own way while collectively they presented a puzzle. It was not something with which to exercise my official mind, however. Nonetheless, I was curious about other reports. People in the village had seen a beer bottle, left on a wall by a drinker, suddenly shatter for no apparent reason. Old Mr Harker had his trilby hat knocked off by an unknown force and a garden gnome had his nose removed.
A pair of Miss Fogarty’s red silk knickers had suddenly soared from her washing-line when there was not a breath of wind and a tom cat, wooing his heart’s desire from an outhouse roof, suddenly fled with a piercing yowl. A ripe tomato was reported to have splattered against the window of a woman who persistently complained about rubbish littering the Greengrass ranch while one notoriously bad local driver ran into a rotten egg which sailed on to his car from behind a hedge. It splattered across his windscreen to make a ghastly mess.
It was around that time that I realized Claude Jeremiah Greengrass had a house guest. This is a polite way of saying someone was dossing down with him and, at that time, I did not link that character with the mysterious events of the village. On occasions, I saw them together in the pub and once or twice spotted them striding across the moors outside the village, or roaming the fields nearer to habitation with the faithful lurcher, Alfred, in attendance. Claude’s companion was smaller than his host, but equally scruffy and readily identifiable by a mop of thick ginger hair, rather like the well-used spikes of a wire brush. He would be in his mid-forties and had a round, impish face with several days’ growth of gingerish-grey beard. He had arrived in an old van and had all the appearance of an itinerant scrap-dealer.
“Who’s the fellow with Claude Jeremiah?” I asked George in the pub one morning.
“It’s his cousin,” George told me. “He comes to stay with Claude Jeremiah from time to time.”
“Not another Greengrass!” I cried.
“There’s quite a clan of them scattered about the moors,” he laughed. “This is just one of them, he’s called Zachariah Solomon Knapweed. You’ve not met him?”
“Never,” I said. “Is that his real name?”
“The family was a great one for finding unusual names, Nick. How about Anastasia Fabiola Greengrass — that was Claude’s mother and there was his aunt, Anastasia’s sister, who was Matilda Dymphna Knapweed — she was Zachariah Solomon’s mum.”
“What’s he do, this cousin?” I asked.
“Not a lot, scrap-dealing generally, a bit of potato picking or hay-timing, general labouring.”
“General lay-abouting you mean!” I’d met characters like this on previous occasions. “So what’s he doing here?”
“If I know the pair of them, it’ll be a spot of poaching supplemented by a bit of wheeler-dealing in dodgy goods, Nick.”
“I’ll keep my eye on the pair of them,” I assured him.
The first intimation that there was any link between the arrival of Zachariah Solomon and the mysterious shootings was when Ted Barnes, one of Lord Ashfordly’s gamekeepers, called at the office of my hilltop police house in Aidensfield. He was carrying a brace of dead pheasants.
“We’ve had a bashing, Nick.” He dumped the dead birds on the floor. “Last night. Umpteen pheasants have been taken with never a sound. My dogs would have barked if there’d been guns but they left those two behind, missed ’em in the pick-up.”
“Shot, are they?” I asked.
“No, that’s why I brought ’em along. There’s no shot in ’em, Nick, no pellet from an air-gun nor lead from a shotgun. They’ve not been netted either, nor given boozy raisins to make ’em dizzy enough to fall off their perches. No, Nick, they were stunned, look. Knocked cold while roosting up aloft.”
He pointed to the head of each bird and I noticed the trickle of blood from their nostrils and beaks. I touched their heads and found that one of the skulls was definitely smashed.
“You can keep these, with Lord Ashfordly’s compliments,” said Ted.
“Thanks, they’ll make a nice meal. You know, Ted, I saw a starling like this the other day,” and I told him about the other occurrences that had happened locally.
“If it wasn’t for that peculiar cause of death, I’d swear it was Claude Jeremiah,” said Ted. “But this is more like a catapult wound. He never uses a catapult.”
“He’s got a cousin staying with him right now,” I commented.
“Cousin? Not Zachariah Solomon?” There was a shocked tone in Ted’s voice. “One of those bloody Knapweeds?”
“The very same, Ted. You know him?”
“There’s your villain, Nick. Zachariah Solomon Knapweed, the finest shot anywhere with a catapult. He can hit a flying sparrow with one of his clay marbles.”
I was then treated to an account of the dubious skills of Claude Jeremiah’s cousin; whatever an expert could achieve with a firearm, Zachariah Solomon could match with his catapult. He used small clay marbles as his ammunition. They were rounded and precise in size and shape, and thus far more accurate and reliable than mere misshapen pebbles. We called them clayies for they were made from clay and had the fragile texture of something like a clay plant-pot. Glass marbles would have been just as effective, but they were far more expensive — and clayies often shattered into tiny fragments on impact, thus destroying themselves while virtually removing any evidence of their use.
With his clayies, Zachariah Solomon could hit a halfpenny thrown into the air; he could knock the drawer out of a matchbox held endwise in someone’s hand, pushing it from its casing, yet leaving the casing intact; he could fire into the opening of a jam jar laid on its side at fifty yards and make his clayie come to rest without smashing the glass. He could hit birds in flight and was extremely accurate even at long distance. Ted told me he’d even competed in a clay-pigeon contest and had beaten many of the guns with his catapult. The fellow was a catapult wizard.
I knew that this was the character who could send weather-vanes whirring, knickers flying and sleeping pheasants to their sudden death.
After listening to Ted’s account, which contained a good deal of grudging admiration for Zachariah Solomon’s skills, I decided to pay a visit to the Greengrass establishment. When I arrived, the cousins were changing the spark-plugs on Zachariah’s old van, apparently because it was spluttering a lot.
“Now then, Claude,” I greeted him as I tried to avoid the mud and sludge which adorned his approach road.
“Hello, Mr Rhea.” He looked up from the dirty engine. “Just doing some repairs, she’s missing when she’s pulling, it’s a duff plug if you ask me.”
“I was just passing and thought I’d pop in,” I said, walking around the old vehicle. Pieces of its bodywork hung off and there were holes where it had lost the battle against rust and rot. And it was not taxed.
“I haven’t done owt, Mr Rhea.” He jerked his head. “Not me, I’m behaving these days.”
“You’ve got a cousin staying, I’m told,” I smiled at him as he emerged from beneath the bonnet, rubbing his hands with an oily rag. “Zachariah Solomon.”
“Aye, he’s stopping over for a few days, we get on well.”
“I hear he’s a dab hand with a catapult,” I said.
“Oh aye, he can hit a sparrow in flight at fifty yards, Mr Rhea — not that he would, mind, sparrows being nice chirpy little things.”
“And I bet he could send a weather-vane whirring, or knock hats off old gentlemen . . .”
“You’d better ask him to sh
ow you, Mr Rhea,” said Claude, who then put his fingers to his mouth and whistled through them.
At the sound, Alfred the lurcher appeared with a puzzled frown on his narrow face, but likewise a ginger-headed fellow poked his head around a barn door and shouted, “Is it ’lowance time?”
“Aye, if you make t’tea,” laughed Claude.
Zachariah did make the tea and emerged with a plate of cakes and three mugs on a tray; I felt quite surprised to find he had arranged ’lowance for a constable and waited with considerable interest as Zachariah placed the plate of cakes and the mugs on top of an old oil drum.
“This is Mr Rhea, our local constable,” Claude Jeremiah made the introductions. “He’s been hearing about you.”
“Now then, Zachariah,” I nodded a greeting as I accepted a chipped and stained mug full of tea, risking a sip before making any further move. It was quite tasty and refreshing, to be honest.
“What’s he been hearing?” Zachariah asked as he lifted his mug from the oil drum. I was not sure whether to help myself to one of the scones just yet, or wait to be offered one.
“He’s heard about you and your catapult,” Claude told his cousin before we had our scones. “Show the constable what you can do, Zachariah.”
Unable to resist the challenge, Zachariah placed an egg in an eggcup and asked me to hold it high at arm’s length. With some reservation I did so and Zachariah then walked away, about the length of a cricket pitch, then pulled an enormous wooden catapult from his inside pocket. With the speed of light, he took aim and shot at the egg; the top was sliced off as cleanly as if I’d done it with a spoon. He followed with a bewildering demonstration of accuracy and speed. He hit coins thrown in the air, sent tins flying from a wall, each being struck before its predecessor hit the ground and then he fired one shot high into the air, waiting for it to return and it did — straight down a fallpipe at the end of the house. It was an astonishing display, and all done with tiny clayies. I applauded Zachariah and congratulated him, asking if he’d ever thought of giving exhibitions of his skills, but he shook his head. “I don’t like crowds,” was all he said.
CONSTABLE AROUND THE GREEN a perfect feel-good read from one of Britain's best-loved authors (Constable Nick Mystery Book 12) Page 12
