Henrietta Who?

by Catherine Aird

  “There is a fairly full account of the accident in yesterday’s local newspaper. I think any Berebury firm holding such a will would have made themselves known by now.”

  “The bureau,” said Henrietta heavily. “I expect it was in the bureau.”

  There was a little silence. They had nearly forgotten the bureau.

  Arbican coughed. “In the meantime, I think perhaps the best course of action would be …”

  “I think,” Bill Thorpe interrupted firmly, “that the best course of action would be for me to marry Henrietta as quickly as possible.”

  FOURTEEN

  Rooden Parva was really little more than a hamlet.

  It lay in the farthest corner of the county, south of Calleford and south of the much more substantial village of Great Rooden. Sloan and Crosby got there at about half-past two when the calm of a country Saturday afternoon had descended on a scene that could never have been exactly lively.

  “This is a dead-and-alive hole, all right,” said Crosby. They had pulled up at the only garage in Rooden Parva to ask the way and he had pushed a bell marked FOR SERVICE beside the solitary petrol pump.

  Nothing whatsoever happened.

  “Try the shop,” suggested Sloan tetchily.

  They were luckier there. Crosby came out smelling faintly of paraffin and said Holly Tree Farm was about a mile and a half out in the country.

  “This being Piccadilly Circus, I suppose,” said Sloan looking at all of twelve houses clustered together.

  “They said we can’t miss it,” said Crosby. “There’s only one road anyway.”

  Holly Tree Farm lay at the end of it. It, too, had fallen into a sort of rural torpor, though this appeared to be a permanent state and in no way connected with its being Saturday afternoon. The front door, dimly visible behind a barricade of holly trees, looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years. Knocking on the back one alerted a few hens which were pecking about in the yard but nothing and nobody else. The farmhouse was old, a long low building with windows designed to keep out the light and a back door built for small men.

  They turned their attention to the yard. A long barn lay on the left, its thatched roof proving fertile ground for all manner of vegetation. Beyond was a sinister little shed about whose true function Sloan was in no doubt at all. Two elderly tractors stood in another corner beside a rusty implement whose nature was obscure to the two town-bred policemen.

  “Is that a harrow?” asked Crosby uncertainly.

  “I’d put it in the Chamber of Horrors if it was mine,” began Sloan when suddenly they were not alone any more.

  A woman wearing an old raincoat emerged cautiously from behind the barn.

  “Are you from the Milk Marketing Board?” she called, keeping her distance.

  Sloan said they were not.

  She advanced a little.

  “The Ministry of Agriculture?”

  Sloan shook his head and she came nearer still.

  “No,” she said ambiguously, “I can see you’re not from them.” She had a weatherbeaten face, burnt by sun and wind and she could have been almost any age at all. Besides her old raincoat, she had on a serge skirt and black Wellington boots. “We paid the rates.”

  There were no visitors at Holly Tree Farm it seemed, save official ones. Sloan explained that he was looking for a man called Cyril Jenkins.

  “Jenkins,” she repeated vaguely. “Not here. There’s just me and Walsh here.”

  “Now,” agreed Sloan. “But once there were Jenkins’s here.”

  Her face cleared. “That’s right. Afore us.”

  “Splendid,” said Sloan warmly. “Now, do you know what became of them?”

  “The old chap died,” she said. “Before our time. We’ve been here twenty years, you know.”

  Sloan didn’t doubt it. It was certainly twenty years since anyone repaired the barn roof.

  “We got it off the old chap,” she said. “The young ’un didn’t seem to want it.”

  “The young ’un?” Sloan strove to hide his interest.

  “Yes.” She looked at him curiously. “He didn’t want it. He’d been away, you know, in the war.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Didn’t seem as if he could settle afterwards. Not here.”

  Sloan could well believe it. Aloud he said, “It isn’t easy if you’ve been away for any time.”

  “No.” She stood considering the two men. “Times, it’s a bit quiet at Holly Tree, you know. There’s just Walsh and me. Still, we don’t want for nothing and that’s something.”

  It wasn’t strictly true. A bath wouldn’t have been out of place as far as Mrs. Walsh was concerned. Say, once a month.

  “This young ’un,” said Sloan. “Did he ever marry?”

  She nodded her head. “Yes, but I did hear tell his wife died.”

  “Where did they go after you came here?” It was the question which counted and for a moment Sloan thought she was going to say she didn’t know.

  Instead she frowned. “Cullingoak way, I think it was.”

  “Just one more question, Mrs. Walsh …”

  She looked at him, inured to official questions.

  “This old man, Jenkins …”

  “Yes?”

  “Did he just have the one son?”

  She shook her head. “I did hear there was a daughter too but I never met her myself.”

  The rector and Mrs. Meyton had taken Henrietta out to luncheon in Berebury after the inquest. Bill Thorpe had declined the invitation on the grounds that there were cows to be milked and other work to be done. It was Saturday afternoon, he explained awkwardly, and the men would have gone home. Whether this was so, or whether it was because of the silence which had followed his mention of marriage, nobody knew. He had made his apologies and gone before they left the town hall.

  Arbican had arranged for Henrietta to come to see him on Tuesday afternoon following the funeral in the morning. He had also enquired tactfully about her present finances.

  There had been a lonely dignity about her reply, and Arbican had shaken hands all round and gone back to Calleford.

  The mention of money, though, had provoked a memory on the rector’s part.

  “This little matter of the medals,” he began over coffee.

  “Yes,” she said politely. It wasn’t a little matter but if Mr. Meyton cared to put it like that …

  “It solves one point which often puzzled me.” He took some sugar. “Your mother …”

  She wasn’t her mother but Henrietta let that pass, too. She was beginning to be very tired now.

  “Your mother was a very independent woman.”

  “Yes.” That was absolutely true.

  “Commendable, of course. Very. But not always the easiest sort of parishioner to help.”

  “She didn’t like being beholden to anyone.”

  “Exactly.” He sipped his coffee. “I well remember on one occasion I suggested that we approach the Calleshire Regimental Welfare Association …”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. For a grant towards what is now, I believe, called ‘further education.’ In my day they called it …”

  “After all,” put in Mrs. Meyton kindly, “that’s what their funds are for, isn’t it, dear?”

  “Yes,” said Henrietta.

  “But, of course,” went on Mrs. Meyton, “it was before you got the scholarship, and though they always thought you would get one, you can never be sure with scholarships, can you, dear?”

  “Never,” said Henrietta fervently. She had never been certain herself, however often people had reassured her.

  “Mrs. Jenkins was quite sharp with me,” remembered the rector ruefully. “Polite, of course. She was always very polite, but firm. Scholarship or no scholarship, she didn’t want anything to do with it.”

  Mrs. Meyton said some people always did feel that way about grants.

  The rector set his cup down. “But, of course, it all makes sense now we
know that Cyril Jenkins wasn’t killed in the war.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Henrietta.

  “No?” The rector looked mildly enquiring.

  “You see,” said Henrietta, “she told me that the Regimental Welfare people did help.”

  “How very curious.”

  “I know,” she said quickly, “that the scholarship is the main thing but it’s not really enough to—well—do more than manage.”

  The rector nodded. “Quite so.”

  “Money,” concluded Henrietta bleakly, “came from somewhere for me when I got there.”

  “You mean literally while you were there?”

  “Yes. The bursar saw that I had some at the beginning of each term.” She flushed. “I was told it was from the Calleshire Regiment, otherwise …”

  “Otherwise,” interposed Mrs. Meyton tactfully, “I’m sure you wouldn’t have wanted it any more than your mother would have done.”

  “No.”

  The rector coughed. “I think this may well be pertinent to Inspector Sloan’s inquiry. Tell me, did the bursar himself tell you where it came from?”

  Henrietta frowned. “Just that it was from the Regiment Welfare Association.”

  “How very odd,” said the Rector of Larking.

  This information was one more small piece which, when fitted exactly together with dozens of other small pieces of truth (and lies), detail, immutable fact, routine enquiry, known evidence, witnesses’ stories and a detective’s deductions, would, one day, produce a picture instead of a jigsaw.

  This particular segment was relayed to Inspector Sloan when he made a routine telephone call to Berebury Police Station after leaving Rooden Parva. He and Crosby had called in at the Calleshire County Constabulary Headquarters to ascertain that the Calleford search for one Cyril Jenkins, wanted by the Berebury Division, had not yet widened as far as the villages.

  “Have a heart,” said Calleford’s inspector on duty. He was an old friend of Sloan’s called Blake. Rejecting—very vigorously—the obvious nickname of Sexton, he was known instead throughout the county as “Digger.” “There’s dozens of small villages round here.”

  Sloan nodded. “Each with its own separate small register, I suppose?”

  “That’s right.” Blake pushed some tea in Sloan’s direction. “Your superintendent as horrible as ever?”

  “He doesn’t change,” said Sloan.

  “What with him and Happy Harry,” condoled Blake, “I don’t know how you manage, I really don’t.”

  For better or worse, Superintendent Leeyes was on duty for this weekend.

  “Well, Sloan,” he barked down the telephone, “how are you getting on?”

  “Not too badly, sir. I’ve got a couple of promising lines of enquiry at the moment.”

  “Hrrmph.” The superintendent didn’t like optimism in anyone, least of all in his subordinates. “How promising?”

  “Once upon a time, sir …”

  “Is this a fairy story. Sloan?”

  “A romance,” said Sloan shortly.

  Leeyes grunted. “Go on.”

  “Once upon a time a certain Lady Garwell seems to have had an affair with a Major Hocklington.”

  “Did she, by Jove?” mockingly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Got her name mentioned in the mess?”

  “I fear so, sir.”

  “Things aren’t what they were in my day, Sloan.”

  “No, sir, except that this was all a long time ago.”

  “That makes it worse,” retorted Leeyes promptly. “Much worse. Morals were morals then. I don’t know what they are now, I’m sure.”

  “No, sir.” The Superintendent’s views on vice were a byword in the Division.

  “This Lady Garwell …”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Are you trying to tell me that this girl who’s the cause of all the trouble …”

  That was a bit unfair. “Henrietta, sir?” he said, putting as much injury into his tone as he dared.

  “Henrietta.” He paused. “Damn silly name for a girl, isn’t it?”

  “Old-fashioned,” said Sloan. “Almost historical, you might say.”

  Leeyes grunted. “You think she’s the—er—natural outcome of this affair?”

  “I shouldn’t like to say, sir. Not without further investigation. The General’s practically gaga.”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing,” replied Leeyes swiftly. “Or rather, it helps the case.”

  “In what way, sir?”

  Leeyes gave a chuckle that could only be described as salacious. “Suppose he’s married to some young thing.”

  “Well?”

  “Then she’s much more likely to dillydally with this young Major Somebody or Other.”

  “Hocklington, sir.”

  “Much more likely,” repeated the superintendent, who was by now getting to like the theory.

  “Yes, sir. I see what you’re driving at.” That was an understatement. “But we don’t know for certain that she was young.”

  “Then find out.”

  “Yes, sir.” He swallowed. “Any more than we know that Major Hocklington was young.”

  “It stands to reason, Sloan, that they weren’t old. Not if they had an affair.”

  “No, sir.” Sloan didn’t know Mrs. Leeyes. Only that she was a little woman who bred cats. He wondered what it was like, being married to the superintendent. He said inconsequentially, “She’s dead. Lady Garwell, I mean.”

  “That doesn’t stop her being Henrietta’s mother,” snapped Leeyes.

  “No, sir.”

  “What about Major Hocklington?”

  “Hirst—that’s the General’s man—didn’t know.”

  “Then find that out, Sloan, while you’re about it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “After all, she could have been in early middle age twenty-two years ago.” The superintendent himself had been in early middle age for as long as Sloan could remember. “And then died herself comparatively early.”

  “Dead and never called her mother, in fact,” misquoted Sloan, who had once seen the Berebury Amateur Dramatic Society play East Lynne, and never forgotten the searing experience.

  Literary allusions were lost upon the superintendent, who only said, “And get Somerset House to turn up Hocklington-Garwell in the Births for twenty-one years ago. Or just plain Hocklington, if it comes to that.”

  “Or Garwell,” pointed out Sloan. “An illegitimate child takes the mother’s surname, doesn’t it?”

  Leeyes grunted. “At least it’s not Smith. That’s something to be thankful for.”

  “You don’t suppose,” asked Sloan hopefully, “that her ladyship—if she was, in fact, Henrietta’s mother—would have taken out an affiliation order against the father?”

  “I do not,” said Leeyes.

  “Pity.”

  “Those sort of people don’t.” An eager note crept into the superintendent’s voice. “What they do, Sloan, is to dig up a faithful nanny who knows them well and they park the nanny and the infant in a cottage in the depths of the country.”

  Sloan had been afraid of that.

  “And”—Leeyes was warming to his theme—“they support the child and the nanny from a distance.”

  In Lady Garwell’s case the distance—either way, so to speak—would be considerable, she being dead. Sloan presumed he meant Major Hocklington and said, “Yes, sir, though I still can’t see why Grace Jenkins should have to die just before the girl is twenty-one.”

  “Ask Major Hocklington,” suggested Leeyes sepulchrally.

  “Or, come to that, sir, why Grace Jenkins went to such enormous lengths to conceal the girl’s true name and then talked quite happily about the Hocklington-Garwell’s. If Lady Garwell were the mother, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Someone has been sending the girl money at college,” said Leeyes. “She and the clergyman have just been in to say so.”

  “Maintenance,
” said Sloan.

  “Via the bursar.”

  Sloan scribbled a note, his Sunday rest day vanishing into thin air. “We could leave as soon as we’ve seen Cyril Jenkins.”

  “And,” said Superintendent Leeyes nastily, “you could see Cyril Jenkins as soon as you’ve had your tea and sympathy from Inspector Blake.”

  Cullingoak was more certainly a village than Rooden Parva. It had all the customary prerequisites thereof—a church standing foursquare in the middle, an old manor house not very far away, shops, a post office, a row of almshouses down by the river, even a cricket ground.

  “All we want,” observed Crosby, “is a character called Jenkins.”

  “No,” said Sloan, “if the civil register is correct, is called Cyril Edgar and should live at number twelve High Street.”

  “Dead easy,” Crosby swung the car round by the church. “That’ll be the road the post office is in, for sure.”

  “Stop short,” Sloan told him. “Just in case.”

  “Sir, do you reckon he’s her father?”

  “I’ll tell you that, Crosby, when I’ve seen him.”

  “Likeness?”

  “No.” Sloan remembered Mrs. Walsh with a shudder. “Something called eugenics.”

  They found number twelve easily enough. Most of the High Street houses were old. They were small, too, but well cared for. Neither developers nor preservationists seemed to have got their hands on Cullingoak High Street. None of the houses were once “wrong” ones now “done up” for “right” people. There was, too, a refreshing variety of colored paint. The door of number twelve was a deep green. Sloan knocked on it.

  There was no immediate reply.

  “Just our luck,” said Crosby morosely, “if he’s gone to a football match.”

  It was implied—but not stated—that had Detective Constable Crosby not had the misfortune to be a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary, that that was where he would have been this Saturday afternoon in early March.

  “Berebury’s playing Luston.”

  “Really?”

  “At home.”

  That was the crowning injustice.

  Next Saturday Crosby would have to spend good money traveling to Luston or Calleford or Kinnisport to see some play.

  Sloan knocked again.

  There was no reply.