Murder in the Goblins' Playground (DCI Arthur Ravyn Mystery Book 1)

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  “They got worse after drinking?”

  “They were pissed for sure, but not from drinking here,” the pub owner said. “Drunk afore they stepped through that door. They were so lit, I refused to serve them, and that’s when they started in about me setting them up.”

  “Were they right?” Ravyn asked. “Did you set them up?”

  Woodcock looked shocked. “Mr Ravyn! I wouldn’t help an outsider against them. I mean, they’re right ponces, those three, but I knowed them all my life. You don’t turn on your own people, even if they are a bunch of muppets.”

  “But you were helping Lent.”

  “Not against anyone, not like they was thinking, not like you’re thinking now,” Woodcock protested. “I gave him names, sure I did, and told him things about them, their little weaknesses and such, but it wasn’t to do them any harm.”

  “Why then?”

  “So they could be won over, made to see the light, or at least to look the other way and shut up,” Woodcock explained. “Take Alfie Winters—a carpenter, but all he really wanted was to make bespoke furniture. Imagine him with a nice shop in the new centre, paying naught but a peppercorn rent and a small slice to a silent partner.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Tom Rawlins—works manager at Red Cap Centre, in charge of cleaners, bins and the such,” Woodcock said. “Steady pay, lots of idle time and plenty of people to lord over. Lenny—night guard.” He saw the look on Ravyn’s face. “Well, one of them…wouldn’t want the place burnt down while Lenny slept.”

  “What did they say when you told them?”

  Woodcock looked down. “Didn’t. Didn’t tell them.”

  “Why not?” Ravyn asked. “That would have got you out of a beating, them knowing you were trying to get them a windfall.”

  Woodcock shrugged. “Didn’t see no point to it. Wasn’t such as I could prove.” He sighed. “Besides, knowing what’d slipped away from them, it would’ve made them all the madder.”

  “I still think I should…”

  “It’s all sorted out, and I think you should leave it that way, or I am asking you to,” Woodcock said. “When they saw what they had done, they stopped and…well, maybe they was sorry, and maybe they was afraid, and maybe they was a bit of both.” He scowled as memories of pain and humiliation flooded back. “One thing I know, they would’ve stopped sooner if the Major had spoke up—he’s still bloody barred—but the point is, they stopped. Patched me up, gave me a drink, and left with heads hanging. They’ll come back in a few days and we’ll go on like we always done.” He glanced around the confines of the dreary little snug bar. “Just like we always done, like nothing ever bloody changes.”

  “They’ll never know what you tried to do for them.”

  Woodcock sighed. “No. No they won’t ever know.”

  “I take it the list you gave Lent wasn’t a physical list?”

  “Nothing ever writ down,” Woodcock said. “Mr Lent, he had a good head for numbers, names and secrets.”

  “Who else was on the list?”

  Woodcock hesitated.

  “The Weird Sisters?”

  Woodcock nodded. “They was the most vocal of them against the redevelopment, the hardest to placate.” He leaned a bit closer to Ravyn and whispered: “It wasn’t just change they was against, those three. I don’t know what you heard, what you know, but the stories told about them—even as a kid, believing most everything I was told, I still didn’t half-believe half what was said. Others were on the list, but were overcome by a whisper and a pound. My lads and those women were tough nuts, all of them, but them Weird Sisters were toughest by far.”

  “What was the lure?”

  “Well, Mr Lent, he didn’t tell me all, did he?” Woodcock said. “Just ‘cause I was helping him on the quiet didn’t make me his mate, I knew that.” He smiled thinly. “But I do keep my ears open, and I think he was going to make a huge contribution to the library.”

  “It would have pleased Miss Nettle,” Ravyn said, “but I don’t think it would have swayed her.”

  Woodcock shrugged. “Everyone has a price.”

  Later, after wringing out of Woodcock everything the man knew, or thought he knew, Ravyn wondered if everyone did have a price. Possibly, he decided, though not always coin of the realm. He eventually fell asleep, plagued by dreams and memories.

  * * *

  Ravyn wandered among the stones of the Goblins’ Playground. A dark moon spread shadows and mist.

  Shree…shree…shree…

  Ravyn turned around and around, looking for the source of the sound. A white owl wheeled against the burning stars, then alighted upon one of the megaliths.

  Shree…shree…shree…

  As if frightened, the owl took flight. It soared above a dark wood where writhing limbs attempted to ensnare it.

  Shree…shree…shree…

  Blood flowed from the megaliths, snaking down the stones then meandering toward where Ravyn stood at the centre.

  Shree…shree…shree…

  Ravyn climbed atop the central stone, now an island in a sea of blood. A hot coppery smell rose around him.

  Shree…shree…

  A pounding sound came from the woods. He wondered what dread beast would be heralded by such footfalls.

  Shree…

  “Mr Ravyn! Wake up!”

  The standing stones melted and the bloody sea evaporated. The dark woods were swallowed by an even deeper blackness. Ravyn sat up in bed, dreams giving way to memory.

  Shree…

  “Mr Ravyn, wake up!” Woodcock shouted. “Something terrible has happened!”

  Ravyn threw on his dressing gown, then flung open the door. The publican stood outside, accompanied by a constable. Ravyn ignored Woodcock and looked to the policeman.

  “Come quickly, sir,” the constable said. “There’s been a death. Two deaths.” He was pale and shaken. “Miss Mayhew and Miss Stone. They’re both dead. Murdered, sir.”

  Chapter 10: The Persistence of Denial

  Ravyn sighed.

  “The Super had no right saying what he did,” Stark said. “He was the one who gave us only the two coppers We asked to have at least one stationed at each cottage.”

  “He had the right and the responsibility,” Ravyn said. “Had he not raked me, he would have been called to task by the ACC.”

  The thought of Heln on the carpet before the Assistant Chief Constable was not, Stark had to admit, an unpleasant one. He knew Superintendent Heln only in passing, but he knew the type, a desk-bound demagogue who knew little of actual police work, more concerned with activism and pettifogging than nicking villains.

  “Maybe,” Stark admitted. “But he needn’t have taken so much pleasure from it.”

  Ravyn looked up. “What’s the time?”

  “Quarter past eight.”

  “How did things go with your wife last night?”

  Stark’s jaw dropped a bit. “We’re still married, if that’s what you mean, but she’s not owning up to anything. Nothing really got sorted out. I don’t think I accomplished anything but make her cry.” He paused. “Sir, how can you even be asking about that when Heln is threatening to sack you? My personal problems are not…”

  “They are not unimportant,” Ravyn said. “You need to keep an even keel. If anything happens to me, it’s important that you not fall with me. A new investigator would only muck it up. You’ve got to keep with it, show Heln he’s not to tar you with me.”

  For the first time since listening in on the call between Ravyn and Heln, which Ravyn had put on speaker while putting a silencing finger to his lips, Stark was worried. He had never seen Ravyn like this. He had thought it merely weariness, the strain of overseeing two separate crime scenes, the long hours, but now he wondered if Ravyn was starting to crack.

  “Sir, are you feeling all right?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Ravyn said. “Believe it or not, I have been in tighter spots than this, more
dreadful situations.”

  “Worse than five murders in less than forty-eight hours, you on the verge of getting sacked?” Stark demanded. “And we’ve not one whiff of a clue as to who the murderer might be?”

  “Who says we don’t?”

  “If we do, it’s news to me.”

  “I had a very strange dream last night,” Ravyn said.

  Stark frowned. “Sir?”

  “Neither as non sequitur nor as self-indulgent as you might think,” Ravyn said. “And it does have some bearing on the case, at least I think it does. Have you considered that dreams and memories have much in common?”

  “Can’t say I have, sir,” Stark replied. “How so?”

  “Vivid dreams can be mistaken for memories, the source of many so-called ‘recovered memories’ sought by psychologists and litigation attorneys,” Ravyn explained. “Likewise, a dim memory may be thought a dream, can actually come back in a dream.”

  “I have dim memories, forgotten ones,” Stark said, “but I doubt you do, sir. Or am I letting speculation get ahead of observation?”

  “I have been rather rough on you about that, haven’t I?” Ravyn said. “I don’t forget things, as others do, but memories don’t always make sense due to missing context or because I was too young to understand what I was seeing or hearing.”

  “Couldn’t connect the dots?” Stark ventured.

  “You might say so,” Ravyn said. “For example, I had a dream I could not understand. The sky was under me, the ocean above me, and a woman held my hand so tightly I thought my bones would break. I seemed to hear a distant shriek but, other than that, I was surrounded by a profound silence. It came in dream after dream, but I could not make head nor tail of it.”

  “It could have been just a nightmare, couldn’t it?”

  Ravyn nodded. “I thought so for the longest time. One day, about twenty-two years ago, I told Aunt Dixie—she’s a vintner and an historian in the south of France—about it, and she solved it.”

  “What was it, sir?” Stark asked, more curious than he thought he would be about some aspect of Ravyn’s past.

  Ravyn hesitated. He pressed his fingertips together, then leaned back and sighed. He was now not sure he wanted to share this piece of his life with Stark, but he had gone too far to turn back.

  “I’ve mentioned staying with this aunt or that aunt from time to time,” Ravyn finally said. “In truth, they raised me from a very early age, in lieu of my parents.”

  “I gathered you had no other family than your aunts,” Stark said. “I don’t pry into people’s lives, but…”

  “An orphan,” Ravyn said. “My parents died together, leaving me alone. I was lucky to have a safety net made of aunts, else I would surely have ended up in state care. I was never told the details, just that they had both died. What I was also not told was that I had been with them at the time.”

  “Bloody hell,” Stark breathed.

  “When I mentioned the dream to Aunt Dixie, she tried to evade the explanation, but it came out,” Ravyn said. “Their auto was hit by another and forced off the edge of a cliff. The reason I recalled the sky below and the sea above was because the car flipped before it crashed into the ocean. The hand holding mine was my mother’s. Once I knew the context, I, as you put it, was able to connect the dots, make sense of it all. It wasn’t the wind that was shrieking, but us. After I knew, the dream stopped…my own mind trying to both cleanse itself of a destructive image and give me understanding.”

  “Sir,” Stark said after a moment. “The other motorist?”

  “Never found, never charged,” Ravyn replied. “However, with my understanding of the images came something else, a knowledge that the accident was no accident.”

  “You mean…”

  “My parents were murdered.”

  Ravyn seemed to shudder with the freight of memory, but it was so slight, so controlled, that Stark was uncertain whether it was real or merely a trick of the eye.

  “I’m sorry, Stark,” Ravyn said. “I probably should not have mentioned it. It’s not something I usually share. I’m not sure why I did now, except to help you understand why I think the dream from last night might have some import.”

  “I’ll keep it confidential, sir.”

  “I would appreciate it if you did.”

  “What about that dream, sir?” Stark asked, as eager as Ravyn to change the subject. “What was it?”

  “I dreamed I was in the Goblins’ Playground, and there was a sound,” Ravyn said. “If you’re under the impression I have absolute recall of every image that flitted though my mind, here I must disillusion you. Dreams and memories, as I said, have much in common, but they are also very different. In the waking world, if you see a rabbit with red wings, you either take a snap so you can flog it to the tabloids or you swear off hard drink. When you see the same thing in the land of Nod, you merely look at it, think, ‘Oh, look, it’s good old Robin Redwing,’ and go your merry way. There is a mechanism in the slumbering mind that makes us accept what we see, no matter how outlandish.”

  Ravyn then told Stark some of the dream that had afflicted him prior to his rough awakening. While most aspects seemed related to their case, there were other images of which he was uncertain. He was already uncomfortable about sharing with Stark the little he had about his life, so he was not about to allow his sergeant to step any further beyond the gate of dream than he had to.

  “I haven’t been to university or even gone beyond the basic psych classes at Hendon,” Stark admitted, “but it does seem you are getting a message of some sort.”

  “The key seems to be the sound,” Ravyn said. “It heralds the appearance of the blood.”

  “What exactly does it sound like?”

  Ravyn considered for less than a half-second the idea of trying to mimic the sound, then dismissed the notion as daft. Stark would be no more wiser, and he would seem quite the fool for trying.

  “Metal on metal,” Ravyn finally said. “Not striking, but metals sliding against each other. The blood was merely an image, as was the dark moon, but the sound felt like a memory, just as the stones of the Goblins’ Playground did. However, whereas the stones have an obvious meaning to me—the site of two murders—the nature of the sound remains elusive. It’s familiar, but too vague to grasp.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything that can be done to figure out anything about it,” Stark suggested.

  Ravyn shook his head. “Something will eventually come, but I don’t know if it will be in time or actually be of much value. In the meantime, we have more than enough to keep us occupied.”

  “Yes, finding the murderer.”

  “And protecting the two remaining possible victims.”

  A faint knock sounded upon the door. It was WPC Stevens with two postmortem reports.

  “That was extraordinarily speedy,” Ravyn remarked.

  “Motivated by the fires of Heln no doubt,” Stark said.

  “Is Dr Penworthy still here?” Ravyn asked.

  “No, sir,” Stevens replied. “It was sent by hand.”

  Ravyn sighed. “Well, I can’t say I blame her.” He looked at Stark. “They may be running pools on both of us now.”

  Stevens started to close the door.

  “Bring Miss Nettle here,” Ravyn said. “Take Sergeant Stark with you, just in case.” He turned to Stark. “After you two deliver Miss Nettle, fetch Gwen from the butcher shop. Bring her around back and keep her in the adjoining room till I come for her.”

  Stark and Stevens left Ravyn alone with the two reports. They contained nothing more than he had expected. Both Marion Stone and Dylwyth Mayhew had been killed in the same manner as the others, with the same unknown weapon—long, thin and round. Both had died instantly, pierced through the heart. The only difference was that Dylwyth had been stabbed from the front, still in bed, and Marion from behind as she sat at the kitchen table.

  The facts of the two cases were simple and sparse, damnedly so,
after nearly five hours of intensive investigation.

  Neither constable had seen or heard anything untoward. The man in front, Wainwright, observed Gwen Turner leave the Stone cottage at 2.11 AM. A brief exchange between her and Wainwright revealed she was enroute to the butcher shop in the high street to prepare for the day. About fifteen minutes later, Wainwright and the man stationed at the rear, Greenleaf, reported the lower storey light coming on in the cottage, apparently Marion Stone rising to start her own day.

  At 2.55, Miss Turner approached Wainwright, explained that Miss Stone was late, asked if he could check on her welfare. After receiving no answer to repeated knocks, he peered in through a side window and saw Marion Stone slumped over the table. He asked Gwen Turner to open the door, but she had left her keys at home and was locked out—she explained she rarely carried keys to the cottage since she always returned at the end of the day with her adopted mother.

  When Wainwright broke in, after securing permission from Gwen, he found Marion Stone dead. Greenleaf raised all the other pensioners in the cottages, except Dylwyth Mayhew. He broke in, conducted a room-to-room search, and found Dylwyth dead. At that point Greenleaf and Woodcock raised Ravyn and the mills of justice began to grind.

  Ravyn leaned back and partly closed his eyes. He played out the events as they were recorded in the constables’ hasty reports and in the answers of the witnesses questioned.

  In the theatre of Ravyn’s mind, night settles, and one by one all the cottages wink into darkness. Both constables watch front and rear of all five cottages from their vantage points. Gwen Turner leaves the house, speaks to Wainwright, then heads for the butcher shop in the high street. After Gwen departs, a light comes on in the Stone cottage, a fact confirmed by Greenleaf. No one approaches the cottage prior to Gwen’s return and no sounds are heard.

  Marion Stone is found dead. Greenleaf is dispatched to check on the welfare of the other pensioners. A door slammed in his face and a quote of fire and brimstone ensures the good health of Mr Bianson; Miss Nettle gives him an earful for disturbing her, and is not impressed by his reason for doing so; and Maratha Chandler is delighted to have company, even at that hour, and wants to give him tea and tell him about fairies flitting among the flowers.