The Hanging Cage (The Northminster Mysteries Book 4)

by Harriet Smart

“You were too merciful,” she said, “with your little deal. And now he has made you keep secrets! How disagreeable.”

  “I didn’t expect him to be so dilatory,” Giles said. “It’s true. I thought by the next time I saw you that he would have talked to you. I’m sorry. I misjudged him.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said, throwing her darning into the basket at her feet and getting up. “It’s all ridiculous! I must simply accept that he’s a grown man and I am becoming irrelevant. He may pay me silly compliments and I can feed on the scraps but he is a lost cause! A wasted effort!”

  “No, not at all. He only thinks that he is a grown man,” he said, rising also. “The truth is he needs you as much as ever. He just needs to find his courage. He will find it. You will prevail, just through your example. He will see how fortunate he is to have you.”

  She sighed.

  “But I have no patience,” she said. “I have used it all up. I want to go to his room now and scream at him. How is that admirable?”

  “But you are not doing that. You are here, and –”

  “And unburdening myself to you, which is just as bad, and for which I apologise,” she said. “I have presumed on you.”

  “It doesn’t feel like that,” he said. “It feels...” He restrained himself from stepping a little closer to her. “Perhaps I am the presumptuous one.”

  He was aware of her looking at him with a careful gaze, the sort of gaze that makes a man’s blood quicken.

  “No, not at all,” she said. “I like that you are here, very much, although it is unsettling. Unexpectedly so.” She stretched out her hand towards him for a moment and then pulled it back.

  “Yes,” he said. “And I...” but words failed him. Instead he reached for her hand and held it in his. “This is a strange business.” She nodded and looked away. “I think you understand that I’m not yet in the position to be...” Again the words failed him: what was this? Was he courting, wooing or paying his addresses? He was only knew that any approach he made to her would be with the most serious of intentions. “My late wife...” She nodded but it did not stop her putting her other hand over his and squeezing it for a moment.

  “Of course,” she said, breaking from him. “It’s rather late. I must go to bed. Patton will scold me.”

  “Patton is more likely to scold me,” Giles said.

  “Oh no, she will not,” she said. “She is already your slave!”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Ash Tree Farm lay in a spot that would make any inhabitant despondent and sour, Felix thought, as they drove up to it in the grey light of the next morning.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised if all of the children had not run off,” he remarked, as they crossed a muddy yard to the front door, “and the mother too,” he added for they seemed to wait an interminable time for the door to be opened to them.

  When it did, it was only by a chink, and a woman, in suspicious tones, asked, “Yes, what is it?”

  “Mrs Taylor?” Major Vernon said. “May we come in? I am Major Vernon from the County Constabulary.”

  “What’s your business?”

  “A delicate one,” Major Vernon said, gently pushing the door, “that would be better talked of inside, ma’am.”

  Reluctantly she let them come in and they went through to a large, old-fashioned and not at all cheery farm kitchen. There was no-one else there and Felix wondered if his idea about all the children being runaways had been correct.

  “So?” she said, leaning against her kitchen table, her arms folded. She was a tall, gaunt woman with a look of great physical strength about her.

  “Are all your children still at home, ma’am?” Giles said.

  “My sons, yes,” she said. “They are out with their father.”

  “And your daughters?”

  “I don’t have any daughters,” she said, scratching her ear.

  Major Vernon let the statement hang in the air, which meant he felt she was lying.

  “I’d heard you did have a girl, Mrs Taylor,” he said after a moment.

  “What is it to you if I did?” she said.

  “We are trying to establish if any women have gone missing from this area in the last couple of years,” said Major Vernon, taking O’Brien’s bill from his pocket and laying it on the table.

  “So?” she said.

  “I was told that you had a daughter and that she left home.”

  “So?” she said again.

  “We have discovered the skeleton of a young woman in a culvert on Lord Milburne’s estate, not far from here.”

  Felix saw a flicker of distress cross her previously impassive face. It was not an established fact that the woman was a young one, but he could happily allow this inaccuracy to pass. She was rattled, certainly.

  “What has that to do with me?” she said.

  “Very possibly nothing. Tell me about your daughter, please, Mrs Taylor.”

  “There is nothing to tell,” she said.

  Major Vernon wandered over to the dresser and opened the large wooden box that sat among the pots and jugs. He lifted out a solid volume that could only be the family Bible and held it up to her.

  “You have no right...” she began, but it was too late. He had flicked open the title page which was dense with names, as was the custom.

  “Three boys – yes, I see, Mrs Taylor. Nathaniel, George and Jacob. And one name crossed out.”

  Now she snatched the book from him and held it close to her.

  “Mary, I think?” Major Vernon said. “Your mother’s name, of course.”

  There was a long silence. Felix saw her glancing down at the bill on the table.

  “She’s in London,” she said at last. “She went to London. She’s in London.” She closed her eyes as she said that for the last time, almost as if she was repeating a prayer.

  “Why don’t you sit down, ma’am?” said Major Vernon.

  She did as she was bid, almost as if she were stupefied, still holding the Bible close against her.

  “You’ve never had any letter or any kind of communication from her, I suppose?” said Major Vernon. “Perhaps she wrote to one of your boys.”

  “She wouldn’t dare!” she exclaimed. “Mr Taylor, when he put her out, he told her she wasn’t to write – ever! And quite right too. She brought shame on us all.”

  “Was she with child?” Mrs Taylor nodded. “And the father?”

  “She wouldn’t say,” she said, and added with a sigh. “Not that we didn’t try to get it out of her.”

  “How far gone with the child was she, when she left?” Felix asked.

  “Four or five month,” said the woman.

  “And when did she leave home?” Major Vernon asked.

  “At harvest time.”

  “And was your daughter at home before that? She did not go away from home to work?”

  “She worked in Whithorne – at the big inn, in the kitchens.”

  “The Falcon?”

  Mrs Taylor nodded. “She would go off. She would never stay at home and do her duty. She was always a wicked, restless girl. I suppose that’s where she met him.”

  “And she said nothing about him?”

  “She said he would take care of her. That it didn’t matter what we thought. She gave my husband some tongue that night, I can tell you. It’s a wonder that he didn’t...”

  “Yes?”

  “He didn’t lay a finger on her!” she exclaimed, jumping up. “Oh, I know what you are thinking. But he didn’t! Swear on the Bible! He’d have had every right to, the way she spoke to him, but he didn’t. And afterwards, I’ve never seen him so cast down. It fair broke his heart.”

  “And when was this, Mrs Taylor? When was it you last saw her? Had the harvest just begun or was it later than that?”

  “It was about two weeks into August, I suppose. She came home for a holiday, but then we saw the state of her – and the next day she went. There was a terrible row, all that night, and in the
morning she upped and went.”

  “She took her things with her?”

  “All she took was a silly band box with a bonnet and a few bits in it. She said he was going to take care of everything.”

  “So she was going to meet him, do you think?”

  “Maybe. I suppose that is sort of what she said.”

  “And how she was she dressed?”

  “In a pink sprig gown. Very proud of that she was. He gave it to her, she said.”

  “So she left most of her possessions behind here?”

  “I suppose,” said Mrs Taylor.

  “Do you still have them? Might we see them.”

  She shrugged, and said,

  “As you like.”

  They followed her up two flights of a narrow staircase to a slot of a room, tucked under the eaves. As the door opened, the engravings and fashion-plates the girl had pinned to the walls rustled and flapped. The room seemed to have been little disturbed since its last occupant had left. Her abandoned clothes and linen remained on the foot rail of the bed, as if she were about to return at any moment and tidy them. Perhaps Mrs Taylor hoped she would.

  She left them to their search.

  “Middle of August,” said Major Vernon, squatting down and looking under the bed. “Can a body be reduced to the bone in such a space of time?”

  “Yes, in those conditions, it is possible.”

  “Did you notice how quick she was to say there was no violence involved?”

  “Yes.”

  “In these cases, unfortunately,” Major Vernon went on, still peering under the bed, “it’s often the father, the brother or the lover. Now, what is that?”

  Felix crouched down and looked under the bed.

  “That paper?”

  “Yes. Let’s move the bed.”

  They pulled the bed from the wall, and Major Vernon reached in and retrieved it.

  “That fancy edging caught my eye. Maybe it is nothing, but...”

  It was a folded card, with a pierced border, with a ribbon threaded through it. On the front was a garish-coloured engraving of turtle doves. He opened the card. Inside, predictably enough, was a printed verse.

  “From her mysterious lover, perhaps?” said Major Vernon.

  “Shame he didn’t sign it,” said Felix. “But I suppose that is the point.”

  “Probably nothing,” said Major Vernon, but tucked it into his pocket. “You haven’t found anything in your search of the culvert that suggests the remains of an unborn child?”

  “No,” said Felix. “Even at five months, one might have expected to see something – a skull at least. And how was Mrs Taylor so confident it was four or five months? She would have been going by the word of her daughter, and she would most likely have lied about it until she couldn’t conceal it any more. So the pregnancy could have been much further along than that. First-time mothers often don’t show a great deal, even up to the moment of delivery. There are plenty of cases one can cite, the mother herself being too ignorant to realise that she was even with child.”

  “So this is a dead end?” said Major Vernon, glancing around him again.

  “Unless one lets one’s imagination run riot,” Felix said.

  “Yes?” said Major Vernon. “What are you thinking?”

  “If you can amputate a hand after death, you might be able to take an unborn child from the womb. Someone that cool-headed, and that way inclined – hard though that might be to imagine, of course.” Yet even as he said it, he found he could all too easily imagine it, and there was a face to go with the deed, the same face that had peered so eagerly down on Miss Barker’s remains. “Didn’t Jasper Herne say that one of the men he saw that night was wearing an old riding coat?”

  Major Vernon was looking in his notebook.

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Once, when I was at the castle,” Felix went on, “Miss Yardley upbraided the Squire for wearing a disgusting old riding coat – the coat you saw him at the Black Cat. And we already know he’s an animal when it comes to women, from what Ned at the Falcon said, and his wife even...”

  “Yes?”

  “She asked me to tell him that it was dangerous for her health for them to resume marital relations for at least six months.”

  “Is that why he threw you out of the house?” said the Major.

  “Yes,” said Felix.

  “You haven’t thought a great deal of him from the moment you met him.”

  “That doesn’t make him a murderer,” said Felix. “As you are about to tell me, no doubt. But he unsettled me. There is something so – oh, I can’t quite describe it – when he invaded my post-mortem. You put it well yourself, sir, when you said he was the sort of man who enjoys a public execution.”

  Major Vernon nodded.

  “Mary Taylor worked in the kitchens at the Falcon,” said the Major. “She could easily have met Yardley there. We don’t know how often that little parlour was used, after all. Perhaps not just on ball nights. And this girl was young, like Miss Barker, and presumably pretty, and easily impressed. Strung along with trifles, and then disposed of when she became pregnant.”

  “Something like that.”

  “There are a lot of difficulties in this theory, of course,” said Major Vernon, going to the window. “Mary Taylor leaves one morning, in the middle of harvest time, when the fields are full of people, or the roads are full of people walking to work in the fields. Does anyone see her walking along the lane with her bonnet box and her pink-sprigged gown? Surely they would remember her? She would, I presume, go down the hill, towards the village. If her mother is telling the truth about her departure, that is. She left without her possessions. That is a significant point. Surely these things,” he gestured about him, “trifles though they are, were not trifles to her. Why would she leave them?”

  “You think the father –”

  “A sour man, Mrs Maitland said. His wife explicitly said there was no violence in her putting out. Perhaps she did not see it. It might have taken place late at night – a violent argument, perhaps somewhere else on the farm. She dies, perhaps from a beating, perhaps by some accident during the argument. Father and sons dispose of the body and tell the mother that Mary has left of her own free will.”

  “But the amputated hand?” said Felix.

  Major Vernon nodded. “That does not fit with such a story,” he said. “And we do not know if Mary Taylor is not quite happily living in London with her lover and her child.”

  “That will be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Felix.

  “I will talk to Mr Taylor. If he is responsible, he might be sick of the secret by now. But first, while we have the gig, we should survey the area a little. There are only so many ways a girl on foot could go.”

  They left the farm, with the Major telling Mrs Taylor that they would be back to speak to her husband and sons. He did it in such a fashion – quietly, but with a steely authority – that Felix imagined that the woman would soon be on her knees praying to God for mercy.

  They drove down the hill to the village, which was not a large one. There were a few low cottages and an unimpressive inn, at which Major Vernon drew up.

  “Odds on I will be disappointed,” he said, as he jumped down from the gig, “but they may have a map.”

  The innkeeper came out of the kitchen door, eager to assist.

  “Who is your landlord, Mr Keane?” Major Vernon asked, when they were inside. “Lord Milburne or Squire Yardley?”

  “The Squire, sir,” said Mr Keane. “His land runs all the way from here to Whithorne. His man comes here to take the rents.”

  “So you have a map of the area?”

  “Yes, sir, we do. This way.”

  “Excellent. And some coffee, if you have some?”

  Mr Keane showed them into a room that seemed to be kept only for the purpose of conducting estate business. It had a baize-covered table, an inkstand, and a chair for the agent, but none for the tenants. Ther
e was also a large map on the wall.

  “You can see where the two estates abut each other here,” said Major Vernon, standing in front of it. “There is Ash Farm, and here we are. And there is the culvert, on Lord Milburne’s side, above Grange Farm.” He measured the distance with his fingers from Ash Farm to the culvert. “About three quarters of a mile, as the crow flies.”

  “A long way to carry a body,” said Felix.

  “A slight fifteen-year-old girl,” said Major Vernon. “And a strong farming man, perhaps with assistance. But you have a point. It is a long way to carry it and not be seen.”

  Mr Keane returned with the coffee.

  “Does Squire Yardley ever come here in person?” Major Vernon asked. Keane shook his head.

  “I’ve never laid eyes on him, sir,” he added. “Don’t have much trade with the gentry, to be honest.”

  “What do you know about Mary Taylor going missing?” said Felix.

  “Only what the gossip says, sir,” said Keane. “Her father put her out, and she went to London.”

  “Would you know her if you saw her?” Major Vernon asked.

  “Yes, she was a pretty thing.”

  “Do you remember the last time you saw her?”

  The man thought for a moment.

  “Perhaps at church at Easter. She was home then, I think. My boys and the missus were gawping at her fancy bonnet. The whole village was, to be honest. I suppose that’s when the talk started that she’d lost her way.”

  “And you didn’t see her at harvest-tide?” The man shook his head.

  He left and Felix took a tentative sip of his coffee. It tasted both weak and burnt.

  “I can see why no-one comes here,” he said.

  “Better than nothing,” Major Vernon, drinking his own down and then wincing. “But I see what you mean.” He turned back to the map. “So maybe she had a tryst elsewhere. If she did leave of her own free will. There is a field path up from the farm here, going towards this building. And here is the road back down to the village. Very convenient.”

  Major Vernon went to the door and called back Mr Keane.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “This property,” he said, showing him the spot on the map. “Can you tell me who lives there?”