by George Mann
“You think I tell them where to find this thing?” The poor child’s idioms are slipping now. “You think I come here looking for thing to steal? Miss Hebron is my friend. I don’t know any boy who do burglary. How would I?”
“That’ll do, miss,” says the detective inspector. “We can talk about all that down at the station.”
“Inspector, this is ridiculous and I won’t have it!” I say, actually stamping my foot in anger. “Harriet is my student and my friend. She’s a good girl, studious, a churchgoer. I trust her. She’d no more arrange to have somebody’s house burgled than… than I would!”
“Well then, let’s just see about that, miss,” says Critchley nastily. “Tell me something – was this jewellery insured? Do you stand to benefit at all, if it’s not found?”
“You’re not suggesting—” I am at a loss for words.
“Well, let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that, eh?” he sneers. “With luck, she’ll give us the names of those three young men and I won’t need to say no more to you about it. Now come on, you.”
Grasping the struggling Harriet by the arm, he marches her out of the room, leaving Annabel and myself in silent shock. My heart is thumping no less violently than during the break-in.
“My word,” says Annabel eventually. She, too, looks seriously shaken. “That seems a bit extreme. I mean, I quite see that she has some questions to answer, but…”
“Of course she doesn’t,” I snap. “That man’s being absurd and prejudiced. He thinks she’s guilty because she’s black.”
“Well,” Annabel says awkwardly, “those boys were black too. And he’s right that they knew exactly where to look. Not many people could have told them that. Unless… when the church people came round for that picnic, did any of them go upstairs? I mean… I suppose some of them must have needed to, while they were here.”
“I locked Mother’s rooms,” I mutter. “I locked all the upstairs rooms except the bathroom. Many of those people were strangers to me, church or not. I’m not a complete idiot, Annabel.”
“Well, then,” says Annabel. “I suppose it could be some completely unrelated gang, who were lucky enough to find your mother’s jewellery drawer. But, Lucy… it’s not terrifically likely, is it?”
“If Harriet’s found guilty it will crush her,” I tell her. “No law school would accept her after that.”
“She wants to go to law school? Here in England?” Annabel looks shocked. “Good heavens. Well.” She is silent for a while, then says, “Perhaps this will bring her back down to earth a bit.”
* * *
After much protest on Annabel’s part, I persuade her to go. I sit, alone with my thoughts and the cup of tea she insists on leaving me with.
I cannot stop thinking about poor Harriet, alone and at the mercy of that ignorant bully. After a few minutes, I jump up and curse my slowness. I telephone my own lawyer, Mr Singleton, whose family have served the Munros for several generations. I instruct him to send someone to the police station immediately, to advise Miss Youngblood at my expense.
And then I sit, and drink the cold tea, and realise that I am exhausted. I have not slept since that first sound of breaking glass, many hours before. Trembling with shock and fatigue, I take to my bed, although it is only early afternoon.
At first I add an extra blanket, but then I find myself unexpectedly hot. Though I have been shivering, it is, I realise, a warm day. I open the window, and retire again beneath the covers.
* * *
It is only a short time later – though at first I have no idea of how long – when a new set of sounds wakes me. They are the voices of men, gruff and querulous with age. My own bedroom runs nearly the length of the house, and the window I have opened faces the front, where a narrow lawn and fence separate my property from the public highway.
“This must be the place,” says one of the voices. It is deep but husky, and sounds strained, like someone hoisting an uncomfortable weight. I think its owner must be someone near my own age. A car door slams and the voice continues, breezier now. “Been a long time since you was in these parts, sir.”
A second voice says, “It’s good to see you both.” This one sounds older, wavering up and down as very elderly men’s voices do. Whereas the first was cockney, this voice sounds more educated, though my finely attuned ear can detect equally working-class origins. “I’ve had a word with the powers that be, as you asked. I found some sympathetic ears, even after all this time. If we can find anything, I should be able to pass it along.”
“Thank you, Hopkins.” This is the oldest voice of all, withered and rattling like a snake’s shed skin. I know of no one still alive who might have a voice like that. “And, Billy, I can assure you I take little pleasure in returning here.”
There is a long pause, and I wonder whether the men have left. “These parts” probably means Norbury, after all, not my house. None of the voices were ones I recognised, but there was something in the timbre of the third… the faintest ghost, perhaps, of a voice I might have heard once, a long, long time ago.
It comes again, then – the oldest voice, smoke-seared like an ancient oracle. “Look at this house now, both of you, and tell me – if you intended to trespass at the rear for felonious purposes, how would you approach the task?”
The second voice, the one the oldest called Hopkins, says hesitantly, “Well, you can see how they did it. Through Mrs Finch’s front garden to the back, via her side-gate, which she hadn’t locked, then through the hedge into Miss Hebron’s back garden. Mrs Finch saw them running back the same way afterwards.”
The leathery tongue clicks. “I did not ask how DI Critchley believes it was done. I asked how you would do it.”
“Well, I’m a bit out of practice.” Hopkins’ laugh is like the squeak of a door-hinge, but for a moment his amusement gives his voice the lilt of a younger man.
“And you, Billy?”
“Well, sir,” the first voice says, the gruff one, “if it was me I wouldn’t go in that way, not unless I knew Mrs Finch’s side-gate would be unlocked somehow. I’d try Miss Hebron’s first. And if that was locked – and if I was a younger fellow, and all set to climb that trellis out the back – I’d not be fussed about shinning over that way too. Going through next-door’s grounds would mean more people had the chance to see me.”
“As Mrs Finch evidently did,” creaks the oldest of the men. “My thoughts also, Billy. Except that from our point of view you are a younger fellow. You may have the honour.”
Billy’s reply is couched in the kind of language I would not care to repeat at my time of life. A moment passes, and I hear his footsteps approaching the wall at the side of the house.
Up to this point I have been lying in bed like someone in a trance, wondering whether I am really hearing this or whether it is just another dream. When I realise that the owners of these voices are actually trespassing on my property, however, I sit up in indignation.
Another of the room’s windows overlooks the side of the house. I cross to it and stare down as a figure – a big man, old but sturdy, his body of a piece with the gruff voice I know belongs to him, dressed in a long trenchcoat and with thinning grey hair – clambers over the gate beneath me. The gate is the kind that can be opened readily from the inside, and as I watch incredulously, he lowers himself to the ground with a cautious grunt, then turns and does so.
“You’ll get us all arrested,” says the owner of the unsteady voice as he comes through. This Hopkins is a wiry old chap, dressed in practical tweeds, and steady on his feet as he supports their superannuated friend through the gate.
“I think not,” the third man gasps between breaths as they walk. “I fear DI Critchley would find us inconveniently white for his purposes.” Though he supports himself on two sticks, he still leans heavily against Hopkins. He must have been a tall man once, but now he is stooped and hunched upon himself, his head sunk low between his shoulders as he hobbles along. His posture and his great
sharp nose remind me of some great bird of prey – a bald eagle perhaps, since his liver-spotted scalp is so entirely devoid of hair.
The three men vanish around the side of the house, and I hurry to Mother’s dressing room to listen.
“I’ll not be doing that again, sir,” I hear Billy saying, “however much you paid me. That there’s a young bloke’s game.”
“We’re none of us as young as we were, Billy,” Hopkins points out, amused. The men are out of sight – they must be standing below the broken window, at the foot of the trellis.
“That’s what I mean. You want to get some new irregulars, sir. Those of us as are left aren’t up to this no more.”
Their ancient companion grunts in exertion, and I imagine him crouching between his sticks to peer painfully at the ground. There is a long pause before he at last says, “Do you observe these splinters of glass on the ground, Hopkins? And the fixtures by which this trellis is attached to the wall?”
Hopkins whistles. “You’re right. Critchley really should have spotted that.”
“DI Critchley lacks an inquiring mind. A window is broken, a valuable item of jewellery stolen, a trellis offers access. Means, motive and opportunity are present, so all that remains is to identify a suspect – or in this case, a scapegoat.”
I hold in a gasp. A rising relief fills my chest as I realise that others – this mysterious triumvirate, at least – realise, like me, that Harriet is innocent.
The men become visible from the window now, Hopkins walking alone across my rear lawn while Billy assists his ancient employer – for such, surely, is their relationship – to the bench beneath my pergola.
The oldest says, “I am told that DI Critchley’s chief suspect has aspirations to the bar. It is an unlikely enough vocation for an immigrant woman, but it would be peculiarly self-defeating for the girl to imperil it further with a spot of burglary.”
“That’s true, sir. But people can be stupid the whole world over.”
“If this were a question of succumbing to a momentary temptation, Billy, I might agree with you. But Critchley’s accusation is that the young woman took note of where Miss Hebron kept an item of value, then shared this information with three acquaintances who then stole it. Miss Youngblood is welcome in the house, and trusted by the householder, so why would she resort to housebreaking?”
“Well, I suppose she’d have been the obvious suspect…” Hopkins begins, but quickly trails off as his friend coughs a laugh. It sounds like footsteps in fallen leaves.
“A fate she has hardly escaped, my dear Hopkins. But if no housebreaking in fact took place, what we are left with is one act of theft and another of vandalism. We might prefer it if the two were connected, but this is no longer certain. That they were unrelated is a possibility I might have expected the investigating officer to entertain, given Miss Hebron’s ancestry and the current state of racial discontent.”
The three stay silent for a moment, then Hopkins continues, “If it wasn’t a burglary, though, whoever stole the necklace would have to be someone with access to the house.”
“I see no difficulties with that,” his friend observes. “Miss Hebron is by all accounts hospitable, and trusting of her visitors. Let us suppose that one of those guests fell to temptation and stole the locket, then later tried to cover their tracks by sending these young men to break the window. That is, I think, as generous as we can be to DI Critchley’s hypothesis given the evidence… and yet we still have nothing to implicate Miss Youngblood as the thief and conspirator.”
Hopkins made an awkward throat-clearing noise, but Billy was more forthright: “They was Jamaicans, though, Mrs Finch said. Who else round here’s likely to know a bunch of coloured kids?”
“She said only that they were coloured, not that they were Jamaican. Nonetheless, the point is worthy of an answer. Help me over to the gap in the hedge, please.” There is a protracted silence as the three old men delicately negotiate the contours of my garden. “Yes, here.”
I watch as Billy and Hopkins between them gingerly lower their friend’s fragile form to the ground, where he lies spread like a fallen eagle. Billy produces a magnifying glass from a pocket of his overcoat, and hands it down to him.
For several minutes they stand quite still, watching his minute observations, and watched in turn by me. Hopkins gazes rapt at the ancient man as if he hopes, even at his time of life, to learn from him. Billy shifts his feet and huffs his hands. As I have said, it is a warm day, but I too am old. I sympathise with him, and worry for the oldest of us all, lying on ground that may still be damp. Then, at his signal, Billy and Hopkins raise him laboriously to his feet.
“A creditable effort,” he gasps, once he has his breath back. “Three sets of prints most certainly, each walking with a crouching gait, once in one direction and once in the other. The shoes are different in each case, yet oddly all are size eleven, and display similar patterns of wear. Furthermore, all were worn by persons of similar weight – surprisingly light for such a shoe – and stride. Remind me, Hopkins, how did Mrs Finch describe the three intruders, aside from their skin colour?”
“One large and well-built. One slim and tall. One slim and short.” Hopkins sounds thoughtful.
“Indeed.” His friend cackles like a saucepan boiling dry. “And now,” he says, “the rockery, if you please.”
He spends some minutes studying the stones my stepfather’s gardener laid down last century, then gasps out a “Ha!” He indicates a flat oval stone with one of his sticks. “You see that, Hopkins? Fresh scratches in the surface, with no signs of weathering.”
He continues under the pergola, after another protracted peregrination and a few more moments of recovery. “If anybody climbed that trellis,” he states, “they can have weighed no more than a cat. It might bear the weight of a slight adult – both coming up and going down again, if they were lucky – but some of these fittings would have been pulled loose from the wall even by the ascent of a child.”
“So how’d they break the window?” Billy asks.
“Most of the glass fell inside the house,” his employer creaks, “but some large pieces ended up beneath. The scratches in that stone are quite consistent with being dragged across the sharp edges of a broken pane. I would imagine that the offender tied it securely to some gardening twine, then threw it through the window from beneath. The withdrawal would be noisy, accounting for the banging Miss Hebron heard after the breakage, but would leave nothing in the room to suggest that the window was broken by a projectile. It would, however, pull down any loose glass that still stood at the bottom of the frame. Such a method of deception relies on the householder being too frightened to investigate the noise immediately, but when the subject is a lady in her seventies that is not so great a gamble.”
I can see Hopkins shaking his head. “Critchley should have checked the windowsill for marks. He should have photographed the floor. The man’s negligence is bordering on the criminal.”
The old man shrugs. “He has what he believes to be an obvious suspect. For a deplorable few in your erstwhile profession, Hopkins, that is the beginning and the end of a case.”
Billy says, “Didn’t Mrs Finch say she saw a bloke climb down the trellis, though?”
That question has occurred to me as well.
“Indeed,” the old man says. “And what, I wonder, was the late Mr Finch’s shoe size?”
* * *
Across most of the dressing-room floor I can see large pieces of glass, the smallest the size of my hand. I lift the towels to reveal smaller slivers, fragmented into pieces by my passing footsteps. Elsewhere in the room the fragments are large, intact since their first breakage: triangular segments following an altogether larger pattern. I cannot see it clearly from here, but the paint on the windowsill seems to be marred by a faint scrape. I think more carefully than I have thought in a long time, more deeply even than I expected to for Harriet’s mathematics lesson.
Annabel Finch has bee
n in my house on many occasions. She certainly visited the bathroom before she left yesterday, while I was downstairs with Harriet.
The thing that was taken was carefully chosen, not for its price but for its value to me. It was the possession that I would have been most distressed to lose. I cannot positively recall having shown Annabel the locket, but I do show people from time to time, and Annabel has lived next door for many years. Even if she found it while snooping, its significance would have been obvious once she realised who the handsome dark man in the photo must be.
She has been feeling isolated in her house, a widow whose family has left home. Of course she is thinking of selling up. And of course Maud Stokes was right that the kind of person who would want – who could afford – to buy a house here, is likely to be disconcerted by regular visitations of coloured people to the neighbourhood.
An elderly dark Englishwoman they might tolerate as a neighbour – as they might some other well-behaved curiosity (a Russian exile, perhaps, or a defrocked priest) – but West Indian immigrants calling round, having picnics and taking lessons in how to better themselves in British society? That, surely, would discourage any discerning house-buyer from any interest in the Finch family house, or at least cause them to reduce their offer substantially.
Unless, of course, Annabel found a way to discourage my association with such people.
* * *
I rush back to my bedroom, and the window at the front of the house, in time to see the man named Hopkins conclude his farewells and drive away. I watch, faintly dazed, still with a sense of unreality about the whole of this visitation, as the other man, Billy, hefts his employer’s weight back into their own car.
“Surprised you had me haul you over here for this, really,” he huffs. “Bit of an easy one for you, wasn’t it, Mr Altamont?”
The ancient figure settles into the back seat of the car, and the oracular voice croaks: “I saw Miss Hebron’s name in the morning papers, Billy. It reminded me of an incident in my past, a lifetime ago now. A face at a window. A whisper in my ear.”
