The Hanging Cage (The Northminster Mysteries Book 4)

by Harriet Smart

  “Nobody,” said Mr Keane.

  “But it belongs to the Squire?”

  “Yes, but it’s half-falling down. I don’t know why he doesn’t put it in order,” said Mr Keane.

  “Thank you.”

  Mr Keane left and Major Vernon was measuring again with his fingers, this time to the culvert.

  “It’s possible,” he murmured. “Much closer.”

  “But why?” exclaimed Felix, wondering that Major Vernon was taking his macabre theory so seriously. He did not like to think that there could actually be any truth in it.

  “You should trust your instincts, Carswell,” said the Major, pouring himself another cup of the dreadful coffee. “Do you not want some more? We have a tramp ahead of us.”

  Felix declined his offer.

  -o-

  It was not such an arduous journey along the road from the village to the deserted house that Major Vernon had identified on the map. In fact, it was pleasant enough, with a wintry, midday sun making a gallant attempt to accompany them up what passed for a hill in such flat country.

  The house itself was not readily visible from the road. But a stone with a few roughly carved letters on it, placed at the bend, suggested where it might be and they followed a track along some quarter of a mile until it came into sight.

  The house sat in a shallow dip in the landscape, making Felix feel it must be damp and without any pleasant prospect. This no doubt explained its lack of a tenant. A high thorn hedge surrounded the place, and the hand-gate needed a good shove to get it open due to a mixture of rust and bramble suckers.

  “No-one has been here very recently,” said Major Vernon, kicking away a tangle of brambles in the path.

  Felix looked up at the grey stone face of the house. There was creeper over half the windows and others were shuttered.

  “Not the most charming place for a tryst,” he said. “Perhaps it looked better in August.”

  “She may have suggested it,” Major Vernon said. “She knew the village, after all.”

  He turned the front door handle, but it seemed the door was locked.

  “Might there be a key lying about?” he said.

  “As if we would be so lucky,” Felix said.

  “People are often both careless, and predictable,” said Major Vernon, who was already looking in the undergrowth by the front step, turning up loose stones. “You see,” he said, bringing out a key.

  “Why even bother to lock the door if...” Felix began, but as the Major Vernon unlocked the door and pushed it to, he found himself silenced. As the door opened he caught sight of a woman’s boot lying on its side, on the black and red tiled hall floor.

  Seeing it too, Major Vernon said, “That could mean nothing.”

  “Or everything,” said Felix.

  Major Vernon went into the hall and picked it up.

  “Sturdy and re-patched,” he said. “The boot of a woman who works for a living, who knows she will be on foot. And why would she abandon it?”

  “Because her lover gave her a new pair?” Felix said. “And they drove off in a carriage and pair? But...” he crouched down, and reached for his hand lens. As his eyes had adjusted to the gloomy hall, he had begun to see what looked like stains on the floor.

  “Do you need more light?” said Major Vernon.

  “Yes,” said Felix, wondering if his eyes were not playing tricks on him and if they were not shadows. But as the Major lit a candle stub and held it nearby, he could see he was not deceived.

  “Do you see it? That long trail of brown coming from there – and then the spots, there.” On his hands and knees now, he followed the stains until he got to the back door. He glanced back. “And it starts –”

  “Over here,” said Major Vernon, by another door. “The kitchen I presume,” he said pushing it open. “Dear God,” he said softly. “Carswell...”

  There was something about the Major’s manner that made him reluctant to look.

  “What the devil...” he found himself saying as he joined Major Vernon at the threshold. There was a mess of bloody sheets lying on the floor, while thrown onto the chair was a heap of women’s clothes: body linen, stockings, stays, a bonnet, and a pink sprigged dress. Beside them was the other boot.

  Major Vernon was looking through them.

  “Not stained, but ripped,” he said, holding up the remains of a shift.

  Felix picked up one of the sheets. It had two corners knotted together.

  “I think this might have been used as an apron,” he said, looking down at the spattering.

  “And can you say that that is human blood? I know you have been doing some studies.”

  “Not conclusively yet, but we might be able to say that this is all blood from the same source – matching one stain with another.”

  “Any laundry marks on it?” said Major Vernon, turning his attention to the other sheets. “Here’s another apron.”

  “Two of them,” said Felix. “Two devils.”

  “There’s a crest. And this is best quality linen.”

  “I’ve seen that crest before,” Felix said, his throat drying. “It was on Mrs Yardley’s bed sheets.”

  Major Vernon nodded.

  “What in the Lord’s name went on here?” Felix exclaimed. “This much blood spatter – it suggests that the injuries were not post-mortem. That they stripped her while she was still alive and...?”

  Major Vernon did not answer, and they stood in silence for some moments. The pictures formed by the objects in the room and what they already knew came unbidden to Felix, and he felt his heart choke with anger and pity for the poor child and what she may have suffered. She was fifteen, her mother had said.

  “It is so brazenly wicked,” said Major Vernon, at length. “So confident. To leave all this here. Anyone could have found this at any time. And to take her across the fields and leave her in that culvert.” He reached into his coat and took out his pocket diary. “When was the full moon, I wonder? If it were done at night, there was a chance they might not have been seen.”

  “He thinks he is untouchable,” said Felix.

  “He shall soon find he is not,” said the Major. “Nor this other fellow.”

  “I wonder what else they have left lying around?” Felix said, crossing the room to what he assumed was the scullery door. A passage opened from it, leading to a scullery and all the usual stores. He opened the first door, and detected at once a familiar smell: that of the dissection room.

  “The candle, sir, might I?” he said, returning to the room.

  “What is it?”

  Felix could not speak. Instead he held up the candle, and let the sight speak for itself.

  For there on the slate shelves where a careful housewife had once kept her stores, there was a glass jar containing a right hand, and next to it another, containing an unborn child of six months.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “Mr Carswell!” said Miss Yardley. “A great pleasure to see you. We had hoped you might call again and disregard my brother’s foolish bluster. And Major Vernon – a great honour, sir, to know you at last.”

  Miss Yardley was a fine old type of maiden lady, in her mulberry-coloured silk and lace, and she received them with such kindness that Giles wished that he had not come with such savage news in his pocket.

  “We were hoping to see your brother, ma’am?” he said. “Do you know when he will be back?”

  “No,” she said. “But sooner or later he will be back. You are more than welcome to wait until he does,” she said. “In fact, you must dine with me. I had resigned myself to a solitary dinner and now –”

  “I am not sure in the circumstances that we ought to impose, ma’am,” Giles said.

  “That sounds grave.”

  “I’m afraid that is the case.”

  “Then more to the point that you eat a decent dinner. You both look in need of one,” she said.

  “We are not dressed...”

  She waved her hand
to dismiss the notion.

  “I appreciate your scruples, sir,” she said. “But I entirely overlook that deficiency for the pleasure of your conversation. And I have a debt to repay to Mr Carswell, which one dinner, ad hoc as it must be, cannot begin to repay, but one must try,” she added with a smile at Carswell, crossing the room to ring for a servant. “Hot water and towels, I think?”

  Giles consented to her plan, though feeling it was perhaps a little weak of him. But he was tired, cold and hungry, and he needed to fortify himself for the next stage of the business which would not be at all pleasant. He had a night in prospect in the charmless circumstances of the Whithorne Bridewell, attempting to get Yardley to confess.

  “We must ask her about missing sheets,” he said, when he was alone with Carswell in the bedroom to which the servant had shown them.

  “She has a low opinion of him already,” said Carswell, pulling off his shirt, and going to the washstand. “Mrs Yardley obviously told her what happened this morning. I would imagine that both of them know a great deal without really knowing it, if you get my meaning.”

  “Yes,” said Giles. “But the truth of it will still be a great insult to them, as a family. They may turn on us and seal their lips. That’s common enough.”

  “Then you must charm all the secrets out of her over dinner,” said Carswell.

  “I shall do my best,” said Giles, picking up one of the towels from the washstand and studying the elaborate embroidered crest. Unlike the white embroidery on the bed sheets, this was in red and black, but the pattern was otherwise identical. “What must be done, must be done. We can only hope that he does come back tonight. I must have a word with his man.”

  “She seemed confident that he would. Oh, thank you,” Carswell said, as Giles, acting the part of manservant, handed him the towel to dry himself.

  “I have asked Sergeant Haines and two of his men to come here at nine, with the carriage. We ought to be able to get him away without too much fuss.”

  As they went down to dinner, Giles asked the footman to find his master’s valet, and waited in the hall to speak to him, sending Carswell into the dining room.

  “About your master – did he give you any indication he would be back tonight or not?”

  “I wouldn’t know sir,” said the valet. “He doesn’t really tell me such stuff. He is either here or he is not, if you know what I mean, sir.”

  “So sometimes he doesn’t come back?” Giles said. “He is away all night, and longer?”

  “Sometimes, yes, sir,” said the valet.

  “He never asks you to pack a bag for him?”

  “No, he just takes himself off for a night or two, or longer.”

  “And you never see what sort of humour he is in when he takes himself off, as you put it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Thank you, that will be all,” Giles said, and went to the dining room, hoping that he had not lost sight of his quarry so early in the hunt.

  He sat down uneasily, wondering now if the old lady’s hospitality had not been calculated. If Yardley had gone off that morning and was not likely to be back that night, a fact well understood by the household, then to blithely assure them that he would be back and insist they ate dinner, was interesting to say the least. But he smiled at his hostess and drank his soup, and considered the best way to approach the subject.

  The soup plates cleared, he said, “Your brother is out on estate business, I presume?”

  “Most unlikely,” said Miss Yardley. “He takes little interest in that, unfortunately.”

  “But he will be back tonight, you think?”

  There was a tiny pause and then she answered, “I imagine so.”

  “So he is often away at night?”

  She gave a sigh.

  “Sometimes he is. Sometimes not. Oh dear, now you have me as a teller of untruths, sir,” she said.

  “No, ma’am. You had a reasonable expectation of his returning,” Giles said.

  “Not entirely. And I should have said so at once,” she said. “Forgive me. I was concerned the moment I saw you. The gravity of your manner, Major Vernon – no, your mere presence here...” She made a little gesture of surrender.

  “It does not matter,” Giles said. “But perhaps you could tell us where he might have gone. His regular haunts?”

  She glanced away, pursing her lips.

  “I know this is unpleasant,” he went on. “But can you tell us anything more?”

  “We – that is Mrs Yardley, and I – suppose he has a woman somewhere. Which is just as well. He is...” She turned to Carswell. “Perhaps there is an acceptable medical term for a man who has strong passions in relation to the other sex? An unnaturally large appetite.”

  “Not exactly, ma’am,” said Carswell. “But it is a good description.”

  “That is his nature,” she said. “I have seen it grow in him from a boy. I am his senior by nearly twenty years, you see. When my late father remarried, I was sixteen. A year after we had buried my own dear mother. My father naturally was concerned to continue the family name.”

  “That cannot have been easy for you, ma’am,” Carswell said.

  “A name such as ours is no trifle,” she said. “And my stepmother was a sweet woman who unfortunately soon followed my own mother into our vault. She died giving me a little sister, who also died. That was the great sadness for me. And I was left de facto a parent to Briggs, for my father was overcome with his grief, and who else was there to direct the household and the nursemaids, indeed manage the estate?”

  “And these passions in your brother...” Giles began, but Miss Yardley now rose from the table. They rose also.

  “I knew this day would come,” she said. “What has he done? What is you want with him, sir?”

  “I wish to speak to him about the death of Mary Taylor.”

  She nodded, supporting herself with her chair back.

  “Of course. Of course,” she said after a moment. “I cannot detain you any more. The truth will be out. It must be out. God forgive me!”

  “What truth is that, ma’am?” Giles asked.

  “The truth of what he is,” she said. “When he was ten years old, I had a fine cat, who gave birth to a litter of kittens. I intended to keep them, but I came down one morning to find they had all been stolen from their mother – and she was wretched with it. And I found Briggs out in the garden with a knife and those poor innocent creatures, butchering them without a qualm. At ten years old! And knowing my feelings for them. He laughed at my grief and told me that they should have been drowned sooner or later, and that this way we could make a muff from the skins. Of course I shook him and tore a strip off him – I would have done worse. But I took him to my father to be punished, and he was whipped for it, but it made not the slightest difference. He had enjoyed himself too much. The punishment meant nothing to him. My tears meant nothing to him. And I knew then he was not like the rest of us and that one day...” She gripped the back of the chair, and shook her head. “I believe that day has come,” she said. “Go and find him!”

  -o-

  Later that evening, Giles set to work in the Bridewell at Whithorne, armed with maps of the district and all the resources he could muster at such short notice. He had sent a sergeant and two constables to wait at the castle, and others to visit all the public houses.

  “And we will go and talk to Earle,” he said.

  “Does he fit Herne’s description of the other man?” Carswell said.

  “I was thinking about that, given that he seems to be somewhat complicit already. And he frequented the Falcon.”

  Earle was having tea with his mother and sister in the drawing room.

  “Rather late to be calling, gentlemen,” he said.

  “My apologies,” said Giles. “But the business is rather urgent. If we might have a word alone, Mr Earle?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he said, and showed them into his study.

  “I presume you
are calling on me in my capacity as coroner –” he began.

  “No, sir,” said Giles. “I want to return to the matter we were discussing the other day at Lord Milburne’s. About Miss Barker.”

  “I have said all I wish to say to you about that.”

  “Yes, of course. But I have had some interesting new information on that matter, Mr Earle. Perhaps we should sit down?”

  “You have been listening to gossip,” said Earle.

  “It may be gossip,” Giles said. “It may not be. I never dismiss anything I hear so lightly. In the rubbish there are often scraps of pure gold. I was talking to one of the inn servants at the Falcon, you see, a fellow called Ned, who was kind enough to show me a sitting room upstairs, tucked away, but with easy access to the ballroom.”

  “So,” said Earle. “What of it?”

  “He told me that you and Mr Yardley were in the habit of using the room for amorous recreation. That he had seen Mr Yardley and Miss Barker there on the night of that last assembly, clearly having just finished the act of congress.”

  “Servant’s gossip,” Earle said, sharply. “Why do you give such stuff credence, sir?”

  “Because my experience tells me when a man is lying and when he is not,” Giles said. “And you, sir, have been lying to me.”

  “That I resent!”

  “Then tell me differently, Mr Earle. Make a case for yourself that I find remotely credible. But be warned, I have heard what kind of man you are and what your tastes are. Your mother and sister will know already. They cannot be blind to pregnant servants and they will tell me the truth, you may be sure of it. They still have the honesty that you seem to have put aside for the pursuit of your pleasures.”

  There was a long silence, and Earle sat down, composing his speech.

  “They were not unwilling,” he said at length. “They were eager enough to be there.”

  “They?”

  “Bel and the Rivers girl. And Bel, I thought...” he gave a great sigh. “I thought we had an understanding. I never thought that – there was no reason for her to destroy herself! I would have married her, as the Lord is my witness, and she knew that! What a fool she was to do that – and Christ knows, what a fool I was to think it was anything but that, and to bring you here!”