What Dread Hand?

by Christianna Brand

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he said. ‘A hit-and-run driver—you can get a long stretch for that. The kid wasn’t dead yet, when they found him.’

  Good old brotherly love!—Fred worrying about me, when after all I had pinched his girl. And him in such trouble himself.

  We went out in the car, where no one could hear us: our old landlady’s pretty deaf and takes no interest at all in our comings and goings, but Fred wasn’t taking no chances…

  Because it was all Fred’s idea: that I will say, and stick to it—it was Fred’s idea. Dead men tell no tales, said Fred; nor dead girls, neither. ‘If they find she’s in the family way—it’s like you said, she was spreading it around she’d been going with half the village. Once she was past talking, Will couldn’t pin it on us two: not to be certain.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ I said.

  ‘She’d be past talking about the hit-and-run, too,’ he said. ‘You say she’s sore about that. She won’t tell now, because it means admitting she was joy-riding with you; but once Black Will gets it out of her that she was—and he will—then she’ll tell about the accident too; it’ll make her feel easier.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’ I said. ‘I’m not killing the girl, I can tell you that, flat.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that. You’ve done one killing,’ he said, not too pleasantly, I thought, ‘that’ll do for you. All I want from you now is an alibi.’

  ‘What, me alibi you?’ I said. ‘No one’d believe it for a minute. One twin speaking up for another—the whole village would testify how “close” we are.’ (The whole village not knowing anything about us and Lydia.)

  But Fred had thought of all that too. If a straight alibi failed, he said, there were other ways of playing it. He had it all worked out—suspiciously well worked out, I ought to have thought; but he gave me no time for thinking. ‘It won’t come to any alibi, our names probably won’t even come into it—as you say, the baby could be fathered on half the male population of Birdswell. But if it does—well, you alibi for me, I alibi for you; they’ll know it was one of us, but they’ll never know which of us; and if they don’t know which of us, they’ll have to let both of us go.’

  ‘And Black Will?’ I said. ‘When we’ve not only seduced his wife, but murdered her—which one of us will he let go?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘we’d have to clear out anyway, if it got as far as that: start again somewhere else. But the chances are a hundred to one it’ll never come to it. After all, no one suspected you of the hit-and-run affair.’

  He kept coming back to that: and sort of—nastily. I didn’t forget that I’d done him wrong, pinching his girl. But that was his lever, really: while he kept reminding me, he could pretty well force me to go in with him—he was in trouble, but I was in trouble deeper.

  So we worked it out: we worked out everything, to the last detail. This was Tuesday, we’d do it Thursday night. I’d see nothing more of the girl; but he’d get her to go driving with him on pretence of talking over the baby business. And he’d lead round to the accident, advising her, maybe, to confess to the police it was me; and drive past where it happened. And get her to get out of the car and show him where the boy was lying… And then—well, then there’d be a second hit-and-run killing on that lonely corner. ‘You got away with it,’ he kept saying. ‘Why not another?’

  There was a kind of—well, justice, in it, I thought. After all, it was because she was threatening to tell about the hit-and-run that I was letting her be murdered. ‘But what about clues?’ I said. ‘Even I left a footprint.’

  He had worked that out too. He and I are the same size, of course, and most of our clothes are the same as one another’s. Not for any silly reason of dressing identical, but simply because when he’d go along shopping, I’d go along too, and mostly we’d like the same things; or he’d buy something and it’d be a success, so I’d buy the same, later. We must dress the same on the night, he said, because of the alibi: and we checked our stuff over, shoes, grey flannels, shirts, without jackets—this all happened in September. Our blue poplins were in the wash—we’d worn them clean Sunday, and second-day Monday; so it would have to be the striped wool-and-nylon—a bit warm for this weather, if anyone remarked it, but we’d have to risk that, I said, we daren’t ask the old woman to wash out our blue ones special. The last thing we wanted, was to do anything out of the ordinary. That was what the police looked for: the break in routine. That was asking for it.

  Our shoes were the same: same size, same make, bought together; a rubber sole with bars across it, but, like I said, new enough not to be worn down, or have any peculiarities. And everything else we’d wear identical: not only for the alibi, but in case of bits caught in the girl’s finger-nails or what-not—you’ve only got to read the papers. Not that he meant to get near enough for that. But she might not—well, she might not kick-in at once, if you see what I mean; he might have to get out of the car and do something about it. And in case of scratches, he said, I’d better be prepared to get some scratches on my own hands too—we could say we’d been blackberry-ing or something.

  ‘Blackberry-ing,’ I said. ‘That’d be bloody likely! We both detest blackberries, everybody knows it: or anyway, the old woman knows it, we never touch her blackberry pie.’ I knew he’d only said it to remind me of the kid: him and his little can of blackberries, spilt all around him…

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘say we got scratched pushing through the brambles down by the river. Do your poaching down by the bramble patch.’

  But she didn’t scratch him. It was all a bit grim, I think: he couldn’t be sure she was properly done-in and he had to get out of the car and have a look and—well, go back and take a second run at her. But she didn’t have the strength left to scratch him. All the same, he looked pretty ghastly when finally we met in the moonlight, in the Vicarage woods. He didn’t say anything, just stood there, staring at me with a sort of sick, white heaviness. I couldn’t exactly say anything either; it was worse than, talking it over, I’d thought it ever would be. I sort of—looked a question at him; and he gave me a weary kind of nod and glanced away towards the river. It was easier to talk about my angle, so I said, at last: ‘Well, I saw the Vicar.’

  ‘But did he see you?’ he said. We’d agreed on the Reverend, because he always walked across the church of a Thursday evening; you’d be sure of passing him, if you went at a certain time.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He saw me. I gave a sort of grunt for “good evening” and he said “Going poaching?” and gave me a bit of a grin. You’d better remember that.’ He nodded again but he said nothing more; and more to ease the silence than anything else, I said: ‘Is the car all right? Not marked?’

  ‘What does it matter if it is?’ he said. ‘It’s marked all over, no one could say what’s old or what’s new: you know that, from bashing the boy.’ As for bits of her clothing and—blood and all that, he’d had the idea of spreading a bit of plastic over the front of the car before he—well, did it. He produced the plastic folded in a bit of brown paper, and we wrapped the whole lot round a stone and sank it, then and there, in the river. There was blood on the plastic all right. It gave me the shudders.

  But next thing he said, I really had something to shudder at. He said: ‘Anyway, your number’s up, mate. She’s shopped you.’

  ‘Shopped me?’ I said. I stood and stared at him.

  ‘Shopped you,’ he said. ‘She’d already sent off an anonymous note to the police. About the hit-and-run.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I said. I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘She told me so,’ he said. ‘It was on her conscience.’

  Her conscience. Lydia’s conscience! I started to laugh, a bit hysterical, I suppose, with the strain of it. He put his hand on my wrist and gave me a little shake. ‘Steady lad,’ he said. ‘Don’t lose your head. I’m looking after you.’ It wasn’t like him to be so demonstrative, but there you are—it’s like the poem says, whe
n times are bad, there isn’t no friend like a brother. ‘It’s just a matter of slanting the alibi,’ he said.

  Well, we’d worked that out, too; like I said. There’d always be a risk that they wouldn’t accept a brother’s alibi, that we two was together. The other time, about the accident, they’d had no special reason to suspect me, they’d accepted that all right; but this might at any moment turn into a murder enquiry. And a murder enquiry into us, now they knew about the hit-and-run. But as he said—we had the alternative.

  I hadn’t counted on its being Inspector Cockrill. When I realised it was him—come all the way over from Heronsford—I knew they meant business. And to be honest, it struck a bit chill to the heart of me. A little man he is, for a policeman, and near retiring age, he must be—he looks like a grandfather; but his eyes are as bright as a bird’s and they seem to look right into you. He came into the old woman’s best parlour and he had us brought in there, and he looked us up and down. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘the famous Birdswell twins! You certainly are identicals, aren’t you?’ And he gave us a look of a sort of fiendish glee, or so it seemed to me, and said: ‘And devoted, I hear? An almost mystic bond, I hear? David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias and all the rest of it? In fact,’ he said, ‘you might properly be called—blood brothers?’

  We stood in front of him, silent. He said at last: ‘Well, which is which?—and no nonsense.’

  We told him: and no nonsense.

  ‘So you’re the one that killed the child?’ he said to me. ‘And drove on, regardless.’

  ‘I never was near the child,’ I said. ‘I was in the woods, on Monday evening—poaching.’

  ‘Yours is the name stated in the anonymous letter.’

  ‘I don’t know who wrote the letter,’ I said. ‘But no one can tell us apart, me and my brother.’

  ‘Even your fancy girl?’ he said. ‘It appears it was she who wrote the letter.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, ‘by my fancy girl.’

  ‘Well, everybody else does,’ he said. ‘All the village knows she was playing you off, one against the other. And grinning behind their hands, waiting for her husband’s home-coming.’

  ‘But all the village can’t tell us two apart,’ I said. ‘I was out poaching.’

  ‘That’s a damn lie,’ says Fred, playing it the way we’d agreed upon. ‘That was me, poaching.’

  ‘One of you was poaching?’ says Inspector Cockrill, very smooth. ‘And one of you was with the lady? And even the lady couldn’t have said which was which?’

  He said it sort of—suggestive. ‘I dare say she might,’ I said, ‘later on in the proceedings. But there couldn’t have been any proceedings that night, there wouldn’t have been time: because the accident happened.’

  ‘Why should she say so positively that it was you, then?’

  ‘I dare say she thought it was,’ I says. ‘I dare say he told her so. She’d finished with him: it would be the only way he could get her.’

  ‘I see,’ said Inspector Cockrill. ‘How very ingenious!’ I didn’t know whether he meant how ingenious of Fred to have thought of it then, or of me to think of it now.

  ‘Don’t you listen to him, sir,’ says Fred. ‘He’s a bloody liar. I wasn’t with the girl that night. I tell you—I was poaching.’

  ‘All right, you were poaching,’ said Inspector Cockrill. ‘Any witnesses?’

  ‘Of course not. You don’t go poaching with witnesses. I used to go with him,’ says Fred, bitterly, gesturing with his head towards me, ‘but not since he pinched my girl, the bloody so-and-so.’

  ‘And last night?’ says the Inspector softly. ‘When the girl was murdered?’

  ‘Last night too, the same,’ said Fred. ‘I was in the woods, poaching.’

  ‘You call me a liar!’ I said. ‘It was me in the woods. The Vicar saw me going there.’

  ‘It was me the Vicar saw,’ said Fred. ‘I told him, Good evening, and he laughed and said, “Going poaching?”’

  ‘There!’ said Inspector Cockrill to me, like a teacher patiently getting the truth from a difficult child. ‘How could he know that? Because the Vicar will surely confirm it?’

  ‘He knows it because I told him,’ I said. ‘I told him I’d been poaching and I hoped the Vicar hadn’t really realised where I was going.’

  ‘Very ingenious,’ said Inspector Cockrill again. ‘Ve-ry ingenious.’ It seemed like he couldn’t get over it all, sitting there, shaking his head at the wonder of it. But I knew he was playing for time, I knew that we’d foxed him. And Fred knew too. He suggested, reasonably: ‘Why should you be so sure, sir, that the girl was murdered? Why not just a second hit-and-run?’

  ‘A bit of a coincidence?’ said Inspector Cockrill, mildly. ‘Same thing, in the same place and so very soon after? And when on top of it, we find that the girl was threatening a certain person with exposure, about the first hit-and-run…’ He left it in the air. He said to his sergeant: ‘Have you collected their clobber?’

  ‘Yessir,’ said the sergeant. ‘Two pairs of shoes—’ and he gave the Inspector a sort of nod, as if to say, Yes, they look as if they’ll match very nicely—‘and all the week’s laundry.’

  ‘Including Monday’s?’ says Cockrill.

  ‘Including Monday evening’s, sir. The old woman washes of a Monday morning. Anything they’ve worn after that—which includes two shirts to each, sir—is in two laundry baskets, one in each bedroom.’

  ‘Two baskets?’ he says, looking more bright-eyed than ever. ‘That’s a bit of luck. Their laundry’s kept separate, is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ says Fred, though I don’t know what call he had to butt in. ‘His in his room, mine in mine.’

  ‘And no chance of its getting mixed up?’ said Inspector Cockrill. He fixed Fred with that beady eye of his. ‘This could be important.’

  Fred, of course, was maintaining the mutual-accusation arrangement we’d agreed upon. ‘Not a chance, sir,’ he said a bit too eagerly.

  I wasn’t going to be left out. I said: ‘Not the slightest.’

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ says the sergeant. ‘The old lady confirms it.’

  ‘Good,’ said Cockrill. He gave a few orders and the sergeant went away. People were still buzzing about, up in our bedrooms. ‘I’m coming,’ called up the Inspector, to someone at the head of the stairs. He turned back to us. ‘All right, Cain and Abel,’ he said, ‘I’ll leave you to stew in it. But in a day or two, as the song says, “I’ll be seeing you.” And when I do, it’ll be at short notice. So stick around, won’t you?’

  ‘And if we don’t?’ I said. ‘You’ve got nothing against us, you can’t charge us; you’ve got no call to be giving us orders.’

  ‘Who’s giving orders?’ he said. ‘Just a little advice. But before you ignore the advice—take a good, hard, look at yourselves. You won’t need any mirrors. And ask yourselves,’ he said, giving us a good, hard, long look on his own account, from the soles of our feet to the tops of our flaming red heads, ‘just how far you’d get…’

  So that was that; and for the next two days, we ‘stewed in it’: David and Jonathan, Cain and Abel—like he’d said, blood brothers.

  On the third day, he sent for us, to Heronsford police station. They shoved Fred into one little room and me in another. He talked to Fred first, and I waited. All very chummy, fags and cups of tea and offers of bread and butter: but it was the waiting…

  Long after I knew I couldn’t stand one more minute of it, he came. I suppose they muttered some formalities, but I don’t remember: Fred and I might hate one another, and by this time we did, well and truly, there’s no denying it—but it was worse, a thousand times worse, without him there. My head felt as though it were filled with grey cotton-wool, little stuffy, warm clouds of it. He sat down in front of me. He said: ‘Well—have you come to your senses? Of course you killed her?’

  ‘If anyone killed her,’ I said, clinging to our patter, ‘it must have been him.’
/>
  ‘Your brother?’ he said. ‘But why should your brother have killed her?’

  ‘Well,’ I says, ‘if the girl was having a baby—’

  ‘A baby?’ he says, surprised; and his eyes got that bright, glittering look in them. He said after a minute of steady thinking: ‘But she wasn’t.’

  ‘She wasn’t?’ I said. ‘She wasn’t? But she’d told him—’

  Or hadn’t she told him? Something, like an icicle of light, ice-cold, piercing, brilliant, thrust itself into the dark places of my cotton-wool mind. I said: The bloody, two-timing, double-crossing bastard…!’

  ‘He didn’t seem,’ said the Inspector, softly, ‘to expect her to have been found pregnant.’

  So that was it! So that was it! So as to get me to agree to the killing, to get me to assist with it… I ought to have been more fly—why should Fred, of all people, be so much afraid of Black Will as to go in for murder? Will’s a dangerous man, but Fred’s not exactly a softie… The icicle turned in my mind and twisted, probing with its light-rays into the cotton-woolliness. Revenge! Cold, sullen, implacable revenge upon the two of us—because Lydia had come to me: because I had taken her. Death for her: and I to be the accomplice in her undoing—in my own undoing. And for me… I knew now who had sent the anonymous note about the hit-and-run accident: so easily to be ‘traced’ (after she was dead) to Lydia.

  But yet—he was as deep in it, as I was: deeper, had he but known it. I said, fighting my way up out of the darkness: ‘Even if she had been pregnant, it wouldn’t have been my fault. I’d only been going a couple of weeks with the girl.’

  ‘That’s what you say,’ he said.

  ‘But all the village—’

  ‘All the village knew there were goings-on; nobody knew just where they went on, or when. You must, all three, have been remarkably careful.’

  I tried another tack. ‘But if she wasn’t pregnant—why should I have killed her?’

  ‘You’ve just told me yourself that you thought she was,’ he said.