The Path of the Wicked

by Caro Peacock

  ‘Don’t see why not. I’ll ask her.’

  I took Tabby out for a stroll, leaving my sketchpad at home because the village seemed to have a fairly strict attitude to Sundays. For the same reason I resisted the urge to call on William Smithies. The place was as quiet as a sitting hen, our stroll unproductive. Before abandoning Tabby to whatever tasks Mrs Wood could find for her, I asked her to meet me at daylight at the paddock again. I was becoming desperate to find somebody – almost anybody – prepared to talk to me.

  The long ride to the racecourse was becoming familiar. It was another fine day, with a light breeze bringing a few clouds in from the west. We followed the same plan as before, going up the path by the trees and waiting until the gentlemen and grooms appeared from the town. This time they were watching out for us. Heads turned and it looked as if a couple of the gentlemen were going to satisfy their curiosity by cantering straight over to us, but the others went off along the course at a gallop and they followed. When they were a furlong or so ahead, I loosed the rein and let Rancie follow. I managed to bring her back to a walk before we reached the finishing post. The line of gentlemen and grooms had turned to watch us.

  ‘Left you at the start, did we?’ one of the gentlemen called, in a voice that would probably carry over several fields when out hunting.

  I said nothing, just patted Rancie and smiled. The man with the hunting-horn voice and two others rode over.

  ‘Nice mare you’ve got there,’ one of them said.

  I agreed and answered several questions about her age, her pedigree and so on. Rancie had become a stalking horse for their curiosity about me. Eventually, one of them came out with it.

  ‘Are you here to take the waters, Miss . . .?’

  I gave them my name; they gave me theirs. No, I wasn’t taking the spa waters, I said. I was visiting a friend in the area. Such an informal introduction would have been out of the question if we were all on foot. Being on horseback excused some familiarity, but by riding out alone and entering into conversation with strange men I was pushing convention pretty far. They were aware of that and making assumptions from it. I saw it in their eyes as I looked from one face to another, coming to a decision. The one with the voice was a few years older than the rest and the most forward of them, with hard and cynical eyes. A younger one on a big chestnut went red in the face and giggled when I looked at him. He was not much more than a schoolboy. The third, on a dark bay, was somewhere between them in age, with a good-natured round face but no great air of intelligence. He’d introduced himself as Henry Littlecombe. I gave him a smile.

  ‘You’ve got a good horse there,’ I said.

  He smiled back.

  ‘A youngster, but he’s coming on. Would you care for a little race, Miss Lane, if your mare’s breathed?’

  I let him win by a head, making a mental apology to Rancie. The other men galloped up to join us, horses surging round in an excited group. I raised my riding switch to Mr Littlecombe in farewell and began to walk Rancie away. He was beside me in a couple of strides.

  ‘I wonder if I might be permitted to escort you home, Miss Lane.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly trespass on your kindness so far. But if you’d care to give us your company as far as the bottom of the hill, I’d be very grateful.’

  His obvious pleasure made me feel a little guilty, but I consoled myself with the certainty that the other gentlemen were watching us as we rode off side by side. Mr Littlecombe had successfully cut out all of them and would probably live on that triumph for a day or two. Providing me with some information seemed a fair price for him to pay. It wasn’t difficult to turn the conversation to gambling by way of the recent Cheltenham meeting. He was all too willing to analyze the performance of every horse in every race.

  ‘I suppose a lot of gambling goes on,’ I said.

  ‘I should say so. The sportsmen and the legs come up from London. A good few thousands change hands, I can tell you.’

  ‘Not just at the race meeting, so I’ve heard. I gather there was quite an expensive two-horse race about ten days beforehand.’

  His cheerful face clouded. If he hadn’t been so eager to keep up his reputation as a good sporting man, he’d have preferred not to talk about it.

  ‘The business of Peter Paley and Teddy Ivedon, you mean?’

  ‘Teddy Ivedon – is that Lord Ivebury’s son?’

  ‘That’s right. He’s a particular friend of mine. He’s pretty cut-up about it now Paley’s disappeared, but we keep telling him he shouldn’t blame himself. It was all Paley’s idea.’

  ‘Really? The way I heard the story, they just agreed double or quits.’

  ‘Teddy had to agree in the end, because Paley as good as accused him of hanging back if he didn’t.’

  ‘Were you there, the night they made the agreement?’

  ‘Yes, a lot of us were. I was trying to persuade Teddy to walk away from it. His debts were bad enough in all conscience, without risking doubling them.’

  I doubted that. He’d probably been as drunk as the rest of them.

  ‘I daresay both of them had taken a drink or two by then,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the odd thing. Paley was more or less sober as a judge. That’s to say, he’d had his couple of bottles and a brandy or two, but nothing out of the ordinary. But he was hell-bent . . . excuse me . . . he was dead-set on that race. And it turned into a disaster for him.’

  ‘It could have been a disaster for your friend Teddy.’

  ‘Yes, we all think he’d have been pipped at the post if it hadn’t been for Paley’s horse stumbling on the run in. Bad luck, too. That horse is usually as sure-footed as a stag.’

  ‘Even a sure-footed horse can stumble if a rider shifts his weight suddenly,’ I said.

  ‘Paley’s as good a jockey as any in the county,’ Littlecombe said, but there was a touch of uncertainty in his voice. We’d come to the bottom of the hill by now and turned on to my road home, but he showed no intention of leaving me. ‘Anyway, it’s not as if poor old Teddy got any advantage from it. No chance of Paley taking on his debts now.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Do you think Mr Paley’s dead?’

  Henry Littlecombe blinked, as if that hadn’t occurred to him.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say dead, exactly. But he’s not in a hurry to come back, is he?’

  ‘So what do you think’s happened to him?’

  ‘Some people say he’s gone abroad or joined the army.’

  ‘But even abroad you need money to live on. And if he tried to join the army as an officer, they’d want to know something about him.’

  ‘Maybe he’s gone into a cavalry regiment as a ranker. He had the horse, after all. It was about all he did have.’

  We rode on for a while together, without my gathering anything more to the purpose. When we came to crossroads with a signpost pointing back towards Cheltenham, I thanked him and said I’d ride on alone from there because some friends were coming to meet me. He was reluctant to part at first, but was flattered when I said that it might harm my reputation if friends saw me riding with a handsome young gentleman.

  ‘You’ll come to the racecourse again, Miss Lane? Tomorrow?’

  I said no, not tomorrow, but sometime perhaps, and gave him a wave as I turned in the other direction towards the village. For the rest of the ride back, I thought about what I’d learned. Far from being egged on by his friends, Peter Paley had been determined to bring about the race that had ended so disastrously for him. More than likely, he’d engineered his own defeat by causing his horse to stumble. And the whole sequence of events had happened a few hours after Mary Marsh had been killed. The problem with making a connection between them was that there was no evidence that the sporting man and the governess had as much as set eyes on each other. All the way back, I wondered how to find out if they had – and didn’t come up with an answer.

  SEVEN

  Tabby was waiting to help me untack Rancie. We gave her a quick brus
h down and let her out in the paddock. She rolled over in the grass from one side to the other and then scrambled up, shook herself and made the ‘hrrrr’ sound that is the nearest a horse gets to a purr. Rather to my relief, Mr Godwit was out. Mrs Wood told me he’d gone in the gig to a meeting of the board of guardians in town. This was the body that ran the parish workhouse and administered the Poor Law, and I gathered he served on it reluctantly as a public duty, like his magistrate’s work. At least that meant I didn’t have to satisfy his curiosity about where I’d been riding for so long. In the afternoon Tabby and I went for a stroll with my sketching materials, mainly to give me an excuse for another call on William Smithies. He was at his lathe again, but this time stopped working when he saw me.

  ‘I gave Jack Picton your message,’ I said. ‘He asked me to thank you.’

  He nodded. ‘How was he?’

  ‘Angry.’

  Another nod, as if that was only to be expected. I’d hoped William Smithies’ gratitude might run to giving me some idea of what the message meant, but he saw his father looking at us and started the lathe again, so that was that. Mr Godwit returned in time for dinner, bringing with him the mail he’d collected from the office in town. One of the letters was a reply from my radical printer friend.

  Dear Liberty,

  You might try asking for Barty Jones at the Mechanics’ Institute. By all means mention my name, but you may find him not very informative, for the usual reasons. Yours in haste, Tom Huckerby

  At dinner I broke the news to Mr Godwit that I intended to spend a day and night in Cheltenham. As expected, he was alarmed.

  ‘I’m sure we could take you in the gig, whenever you wanted. Whom do you need to see? Do you know anybody there? Where will you stay?’

  I answered, more or less truthfully, that I was by no means sure whom I needed to see, but my inquiries in the village weren’t getting far, so I should fish in a wider pool. No, I knew nobody there, but I had a couple of lines of inquiry which I would let him know more about if they were successful. As for where I’d stay, I supposed that a spa town would not be short of hotels. That, at least, provided a distraction. Over coffee he pondered the rival merits of hotels: the Royal or the Imperial were the choice for many visitors, but the Plough and the Belle Vue were thoroughly respectable. On reflection, though, it should be the Queen’s. He knew the manager there – a very decent man. He’d have a word with him to see that I was looked after and made comfortable. I would have preferred to do without such attention, but it made him feel better. He insisted that he’d drive me in himself next morning in the gig.

  I went to find Tabby. She was by the gates, looking out at the road and probably pining for London. Her mood wasn’t improved by the news that I was going away and leaving her behind.

  ‘I’m fed up with shelling peas and Mrs Wood looking at me sideways. And what if you get in trouble and I’m not there?’

  ‘I’m not intending to get into trouble. You’ve got work to do for me here. You know I’m relying on you to find out what you can from Sal Picton.’

  ‘I’m getting nowhere with that.’

  ‘You’ve only just started. You can’t expect her to tell you the family secrets in two visits. Then there are the Kembles. Speak to the maid if you get a chance, even if I’m not there. What we want is to find out anything we can about Miss Marsh, the governess.’ I hesitated, wondering whether to share the thought with her. ‘Especially whether there’s been any gossip at all about her and Rodney Kemble.’

  She gave me a sideways look. ‘You reckon?’

  ‘I don’t know one way or the other. But it wouldn’t be the first time the son of the house had taken advantage of the governess.’

  ‘Then knocked her on the head to stop her telling anyone?’

  ‘There’s not a shred of evidence for that, so don’t think about it. Just pick up what you can and let me know. I’ll be back by Thursday at the latest. Give Rancie her morning carrot and talk to her now and then.’

  Because Mr Godwit dined so early, there was plenty of daylight left. I walked to the road and found the village sunk in summer-evening peace, not even a dog moving. I strolled with no clear sense of direction, thinking that there was a great gap in my investigations. The name of that gap was Mary Marsh. Usually, if you’re investigating a murder, the victim is where you start. What were her habits? Who were her friends or enemies? Did she meet her killer at home? Go willingly or unwillingly to the place where she was killed? I’d started from the opposite side, with the presumed killer, so had asked none of these questions. Asking them now, I found no answers. Nobody had said anything about the dead woman’s family or friends. That went with her occupation. Usually an educated woman would go into service as a governess because she had no relatives or close friends to help her. It was the loneliest of positions – above the other servants but below the family. When not with her pupils, she’d be left very much on her own, closed in by the respectability of being a lady, without any of the advantages. It would have been even worse in Miss Marsh’s case because she’d had only one pupil, and Barbara Kemble was now almost too old to need her. After a mile or so of this, I realized that I had a direction, after all. My feet were taking me towards the Kembles’ house, the red-tiled roof in the woods I’d seen from the hill. Without thinking much about it, I’d decided I needed to find the place where Mary Marsh died.

  Pasture stretched downhill on my right, golden in the light from the setting sun. On the left hand, woods of ash and oak crowded close to the path and were already smudged by dusk. They were well-kept woods, the trees straight and even. I guessed I was already at the boundaries of the Kembles’ estate. After another half mile or so, a narrow gate led into the woods. Its latch and hinges were so well balanced that it opened at a touch. I took that for an invitation and walked through it into a woodland ride, at right angles to the road. It seemed darker under the trees, the ground deeply rutted, probably from where timber had been dragged out. Rabbits scuttered across and a tawny owl scooped the air with a whisper of wings just above my head. When the track came to a crossroads, I took a right turn, judging that was in the direction of the house. I was guessing that if Mary Marsh had gone to meet somebody by appointment, it wouldn’t have involved a long walk. After a few hundred yards, the track broadened out into a clearing. Trees must have been thinned there quite recently, because the only ones left standing were tall young ashes as straight as pencils. The trunks were silver columns, the tops feathery silhouettes shifting in the after-sunset breeze against a white sky. I stopped suddenly, sure beyond all doubt that this was the place where Mary Marsh had died.

  There was no logical reason for it. After twenty-five days there’d be no lingering smell of blood. If the tramplings of people who’d taken the body away were still there on the hard earth, they wouldn’t show in the dusk. The nettles beside the track might have been crushed down for a while when a piece of iron matted with blood and hair was thrown into them, but nettles grow quickly at this time of year and they showed no sign of it. So I couldn’t explain it logically, beyond the thought that if somebody wanted a secluded meeting place not too far from the house, this would do very well. I stood in the clearing, feeling cold enough to wish I’d brought a shawl, and imagined Mary Marsh waiting there, hearing footsteps that surely weren’t coming for the reason she expected. She’d have heard, as I heard, the leaves shifting in the breeze, the low of a cow from a distant field, a fox rustling through the undergrowth. Then footsteps on the hard earth, just as I was hearing them now. I was so absorbed in Mary Marsh that it took me a few seconds to realize that these weren’t in my thoughts of her; they were happening here and now, coming not towards her but towards me. My heart started racing and for a few moments of confusion I couldn’t move. Male steps, certainly. Not hurrying, but not slow either; confident, as if the man planting his bootsoles down knew the ground and had a right to be there. I turned, intending to go back along the track. I managed maybe twenty yards befo
re I knew it was useless. The male steps had stopped. Instead, there was a presence in the clearing and the feeling of eyes watching my back. It was all I could do to turn round and look at him. A young man, quite tall, in jacket and breeches. A shotgun, broken, in the crook of his arm. A face that was no more than a pale mask in the dusk, with dark ovals for eyes. I knew from my sight of them in the churchyard the day before that the eyes were the colour of buried hazelnuts. I was looking at Rodney Kemble and he was looking at me.

  I spoke first. I had nothing to lose.

  ‘It was here, wasn’t it?’ I said.

  I thought he wasn’t going to say anything. I waited, alert for the movement of lifting the shotgun and snapping its two halves together. I’d run into the woods and dodge, not a great hope but the best. The shotgun stayed where it was, angled over his arm.

  ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

  He sounded as alarmed as I was. Obviously, any memory of meeting me the day before had gone.

  ‘It was here?’ I asked again.

  The mask-like face dipped briefly and rose again.

  ‘What do you want?’

  This time there was something close to panic in his voice. I wondered if he’d taken me for the ghost of Miss Marsh.

  ‘To know who killed her,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know?’ There was something like appeal in his voice.

  ‘I don’t know. I’d like to know,’ I said.

  A fox or something moved to the side of us. His hand went to the shotgun, then away again. If I stayed any longer with that pale face looking at me, I’d scream or babble.

  ‘I’m going now,’ I said.

  I turned and started walking back along the track, which looked much darker than a few minutes ago, trying not to hurry or stumble. I expected shotgun pellets to come at any moment, exploding through the leaves into my back. Then, when the explosion didn’t come, I listened for footsteps running behind me, even imagined I heard them. But they didn’t come either. More by luck than anything, I found the track back to the gate. When it closed behind me and I was standing on the road, with no footsteps following me out of the wood, I leaned on the top bar, gasping and sobbing as if I’d been running a mile. Eventually, I got myself back to the house. The lamps were lit and Mr Godwit mildly concerned. I’d gone for a stroll and got lost, I said. I was sorry he’d been worried.