Ravyn consulted the postmortem reports. Even Dr Penworthy’s skill could reveal which woman died first. He sighed and tossed the reports on the desk, along with Stark’s notes, the various statements, and the preliminary results from the forensics team. No one could have killed either woman, but someone had.
A soft knock sounded, then Stevens opened the door. “I have Miss Nettle, sir. Should I bring her in?”
“What about Sergeant Stark?”
She frowned. “You told him to get that girl. He went off soon as we had Miss Nettle’s cooperation.”
“Bring her in, Stevens.”
The WPC nodded, ducked out and returned with Lillian Nettle. The look of relief on Stevens’ face told Ravyn everything he needed to know about Miss Nettle’s disposition, and the village librarian confirmed it as soon as she opened her mouth.
“Your total incompetence is an outrage, Chief Inspector, and I shall lodge a formal complaint with Superintendent Heln, the Chief Constable, and the Professional Standards division of the Stafford Police,” she said. “I shall demand your discharge. The way you have conducted this investigation is nothing short of criminal.”
“Good morning, Miss Nettle.” Ravyn pushed aside the papers and gestured to the chair across from him. “Please be seated.”
She hesitated.
“Please,” he said. “I have some questions to ask you, and you would be much more comfortable seated.”
“Did you not hear what I said to you?” she demanded.
He nodded. “I heard.”
“You have nothing to say for yourself?”
“It is your right to make any complaint you see fit.” He again gestured toward the chair. “Please, be seated.”
Finally, she sat, perched on the edge of the seat, her body stiff. She stared intently at the man across from her.
“Please accept my condolences for the loss of your friends,” he said. “You told me earlier the three of you were not as close as you once had been, but the ties that bind can never be severed entirely, no matter how events and passing years may strain them. I am truly sorry for your loss.”
Lillian’s eyes moistened slightly, but her gaze did not soften, nor was there ever the danger of an escaping tear. “Thank you.”
“It should be clear that you and Gwen Turner are very much in danger,” Ravyn said. “Five people have died, and there is a thread that connects all of them, and you and Gwen as well.”
“No, that is not true,” Lillian said. “Oscar Lent.”
“Not by bone or blood,” Ravyn admitted, “but by the mysteries kept by Red Cap Woods.”
Lillian cast a glance at the digital recorder. “Are you going to record this interview?”
“I can, if you wish.”
After a moment, Lillian shook her head.
“Do you know anything about ley lines?” Ravyn asked.
“I know they are lines of power,” she replied. “They mark the old places where earth forces are concentrated. In ancient times, the priests and priestesses called forth energies, both dark and light.”
“And drew down the moon sometimes?”
Lillian’s lips parted and she took a quick breath as Ravyn cited the ancient formula. She hid her surprise by shifting in her seat, as if experiencing physical discomfort. She slid back, pressed her stiff spine against the ladder frame of the chair.
“Occasionally,” she said.
“If I wanted to build a church or temple, a shrine of any kind, I would want to locate it on a ley line,” Ravyn said. “Perhaps at the intersection of lines.”
“Yes, that is true.”
“What if I were to bury something at intersecting ley lines?”
Lillian fidgeted, but it had nothing to with the discomfort of the chair. “What do ley lines have to with the murders of my friends, our children, or, for that matter, Oscar Lent?”
“Allan was searching for something using ley lines.”
“You said earlier he was searching for something, but you said nothing about ley lines,” she noted.
“Once I examined the maps and photos in detail it became clear he was charting the paths and intersections of all ley lines passing through Hammershire County,” Ravyn explained. “He was keenly interested in those traversing Red Cap Woods.”
Her gaze narrowed. “You said that information was lost when the caravan burned down.”
“Allan’s problem, of course, was the ley lines themselves,” he continued. “As Sergeant Stark pointed out to me when I discussed the subject with him, ley lines pass through many significant sites, but mostly they pass through nothing at all.”
She nodded.
“And we don’t actually know where ley lines really are, do we?” he said. “We can guess and suppose and conjecture, but the truth is, knowledge of that sort was lost to us with the passing of the ancient world.”
“No, it has been preserved,” she said. “Passed down by those who observe old ways.”
“Paganism, as currently practiced, only goes back to the end of the Seventeenth Century,” Ravyn pointed out. He cut off Lillian’s attempt to protest, saying: “Even in Ashford, and in a county where the past often intrudes upon the present and old things refuse to die, traditions are not immutable. You and your friends held certain rites in the woods which were passed down. But, at some point, someone had to reconstruct a rite that was ill-remembered or perhaps not entirely explained before death or misfortune came upon the holder of that knowledge. There have been too many discontinuities in history, too many breaks in lineages, for knowledge to be preserved with absolute fidelity.”
Lillian pursed her lips. “You are stating the obvious.”
“I suppose I am,” he admitted.
“And the rites to which you refer so ignorantly have nothing to do with the murders,” she added. “My beliefs are not on trial. They did not cause the deaths of anyone.”
Ravyn remained silent, watching her.
“Our beliefs did not cause anyone to be murdered,” she said. “They have no more to do with the murders than do ley lines.”
“Allan was using ley lines to find Douglas Trentmoore’s grave,” Ravyn said. “He believed the physical avatar of the Lord of the Woods would be buried at a confluence of ley lines.”
Lillian Nettle opened her mouth, but only a strangled little gasp emerged. She paled.
“His problem was there are so many ley lines, especially in a numinous place like Red Cap Woods,” Ravyn said. “Connect all the sacred places in the British Isles and you have a dizzying array. Add to those all the paths and tracks that evolved through traditions and beliefs, through a desire to connect unconnected places, through a need to make quite ordinary places extraordinary, and through all the errors and fallibilities to which we are all heirs, mistakes copied and multiplied. Allan found himself confronted with the task of trying to find a needle in a needle-stack.”
“He knew…” Lillian’s lips formed portions of words she could not bring herself to say. “No, he did not…could not…”
“The trouble with children is they never truly take to what they are taught,” Ravyn said. “It’s almost axiomatic that each generation rebuffs the one before. The giddy youths who rampaged merrily after the Great War brought forth a pragmatic generation who fought the second half of that war; cynics raised technocrats, who then raised children addicted to love, drugs and flower power. The progeny of those happy folk are the financial sharks and wolves who now pillage the world. Your efforts to make your children into little pagans like yourselves were doomed from the start.”
Lillian shot to her feet. “I have had enough of this!”
“Sit down,” Ravyn said.
Lillian turned toward the door.
“Allan was very close to finding his father’s grave,” Ravyn said. “Close enough to demand payment from Oscar Lent.”
Lillian stopped but did not turn around. “He may have known about Douglas’ grave, but he did not know who his father was.”
“If he got into fights to deny a lie, he’d be less likely to stumble over the truth,” Lillian said. “Even if he found about Douglas, why would he seek to disinter him?”
“Neither Allan nor Lent wanted to dig up the body, but each had his own reason for needing to know where it was,” Ravyn said. “Allan wanted money, and perhaps answers, but Lent wanted power. You may not have known what Allan was doing, but you should have known Lent would try another tactic when his plan to sway you by endowing the library failed.”
Lillian returned to the chair. Her gaze remained lowered.
“Everyone has a price,” Ravyn said. “Lent lived by that motto. With most people it is coin of the realm because that is the heart’s desire. It was how he swayed one person after another, quietly.”
Lillian nodded. “I saw the change at meetings, fewer people voicing their protests, sitting there, mute, hands in lap.”
“Everyone has a price,” Ravyn repeated. “All Lent needed to do was to discover the right currency.”
“Tried to bribe me with a strings-free endowment to the village library,” Lillian said. “He thought I would leap at the opportunity to manage the library in my own way, free of financial restraints.”
“He didn’t understand your attachment to the woods.”
“Men like Oscar Lent understand precious little about anything that is truly important,” Lillian said. “He thought he could appeal to me, to all three of us, first by money, then by kind.”
“Marion and Dylwyth were resolved as well?”
Lillian nodded.
“None of you could afford to have the woods developed, the trees knocked down or the ground dug up,” Ravyn said. “Eventually the grave would be discovered.”
Lillian looked up. Her eyes were moist, but they were also filled with icy fire. “You have no more understanding than Lent. You poor, pathetic, ignorant man. It’s the woods themselves that are important. They are holy, sacred to the powers of the universe.”
“And the grave?” Ravyn prompted.
“Yes, we knew there was a danger of it being found, but only if the development went through,” Lillian answered. “It hardly matters anymore—whatever Allan knew died with him, and no one will carry through on the development without Lent.” She paused. “But I did not kill either one.”
“I know.”
She looked at him slyly. “How much did Allan know?”
“I don’t know if Allan knew Dylwyth was his mother,” Ravyn said, “but he knew Trentmoore was his father.”
“Dylwyth was a silly girl, but we all proved in time what silly girls we really were,” she said. “We were worried when he returned and took up residence in that wretched caravan. When he fell into a wastrel life with no other ambition than to drink and bully, we assumed he did not know who used to live there. Both Dylwyth and Marion called it happenstance; I assumed he was poking his finger in my eye, knowing what those woods meant to me.”
“You all assumed he had been given lease by the powers of the woods,” Ravyn said.
“Yes, reprobate though he had become.”
“From what I observed, he had been searching for the grave for no little while,” Ravyn said. “He either found something in the caravan that told him…”
“No,” Lillian said. “When Douglas went…when he was with us no more, we went through the caravan and removed everything of a personal nature. It was not much.”
“Or Raymond might have told him,” Ravyn suggested.
Lillian’s nod was barely perceptible. “Always a precocious lad, that one. He was not yet five then, but he knew the woods better than any of us. More than anything, it was his affinity with nature that convinced us Douglas was indeed an avatar of the Lord of the Woods, no matter his human failings.”
“Because you and Dylwyth saw so little of Marion in him?”
Lillian nodded. “There was nothing of Marion in him. She was a clod, a dull-minded woman who cut up animals for a living, for God’s sake. We should never have let her join us, but we had little choice once she found out.”
“Since paganism has always been something of an open secret in Ashford, your activities would have come as no great shock,” Ravyn pointed out. “However, no one would have looked kindly on your and Dylwyth’s sexual relationship, things being what they were then.”
“No, she had us snared,” Lillian agreed. “If we didn’t let her in, she would tell our parents, our friends, our employers. It never was anything more than a schoolgirl crush, but, as you say, things were different back then.”
“And yet you became friends.”
“In time, we saw Marion’s desire to learn the old ways was a sincere one,” she explained. “She had poor social skills, but what can you expect from a woman who cuts up dead animals simply for the reason that her family has always done so?”
“Did you know she was carrying on with Trentmoore?”
“I suspected Dylwyth might be, silly and impressionable girl that she was, but neither of us knew about Marion,” Lillian said. “We never thought Douglas would be interested in such a woman, gross of body and coarse of mind. What could she offer the Lord of the Woods?” She looked up sharply. “Please understand, at that time we really thought him the Lord of the Woods.”
Ravyn nodded. From Lillian’s tone, it was obvious she still saw the long-dead Douglas Trentmoore as the Lord of the Woods.
“We only found out when Marion began to show,” Lillian said. “We helped her hide her pregnancy and when the time came we delivered it ourselves.” She paused. “In Red Cap Woods.”
“How did Raymond come to Dylwyth?”
“She and I agreed Marion was an unfit mother and ill-suited to teaching the man-child the Old Ways,” she explained. “I certainly did not want the little beast, so it fell to Dylwyth.”
“Marion made no protest?”
“You’ve met her,” she said. “You’re a detective; did you detect any maternal instincts?”
“Then Dylwyth herself became pregnant, with Allan,” Ravyn said. “Another pregnancy you conspired to hide.”
“That we did, and another man-child delivered in the hallowed groves of Red Cap Woods,” she confirmed. “Dylwyth already had a child to raise and Marion was still the most unfit of mothers. I did not want it, but I had no choice.”
“Dylwyth did not go quietly into the night?”
“No, she did not,” Lillian said. “Of us, she was always the most sensitive, no doubt a product of her Welsh ancestry. She wept rivers of tears, but in time even she saw the necessity. Still, I don’t think she ever really cut the cord fully.”
Ravyn thought back to Stark’s report of her reaction to Allan’s death, of her near hysteria during the interview. Despite everything, both the efforts of her friends and her knowledge of the worthless being Allan had become, the silver cord remained unsevered.
“And then came your own pregnancy,” he said.
“Douglas was a very persuasive man, and I always knew he had wanted me more than the others,” she said. “I also knew he turned to the others only because I remained unobtainable.”
Ravyn watched her features and body movements. Clearly, she believed her own words. Looking at her, he saw the remains of a handsome woman, but not a desirable one. He could understand Trentmoore being attracted by Marion’s carnality and Dylwyth’s vulnerability, but he floundered with Lillian.
“When Gwen was born,” she continued, “it was natural to give her to Marion to raise.”
“Had Marion changed?’ Ravyn asked. “Had seeing her own son go to Dylwyth, and Dylwyth’s to you given her second thoughts about motherhood?”
“No, she was still a clod,” Lillian said. “A most unfit mother.”
“Then I don’t understand why…”
“Gwen was a most unfit child.”
“Had she been born yet when Trentmoore…died?”
“No, she was still festering in my womb.”
Ravyn hesitated. “Which of you killed him?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Everything we worked so hard to hide is known. My friends are dead, and our children, except for the most worthless. You said a human hand was behind this. I now find myself aligned with poor weak credulous Dylwyth. The Lord of the Wood is punishing me for her sin.”
“Dylwyth Mayhew killed Douglas Trentmoore?”
“It was accidental,” she said. “There was an argument. Dylwyth refused to say what about, but I know it was because I was pregnant. Dylwyth was jealous. I was smarter and understood more of the old mysteries, and she knew in her heart Douglas only went to her and Marion because I would not give in to him…at first. That they were arguing because of me is the only explanation that makes sense.”
Ravyn imagined a dozen other reasons, but said nothing.
“She pushed him or he tripped while drunk,” she continued. “He hit his head. We buried him. Only we knew anything about it.”
“Could Raymond have known?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“He was precocious,” he said. “All over those woods. Could he have followed, or come upon you as you were…working?”
Lillian shook her head, but tattered memories drifted though her mind, of a pale figure that vanished when she tried to see it, and patters at the edge of hearing. She recalled lying at her lover’s side, noting how unknown hands had tended the grave. Elves, she had always thought, caring for their fallen Lord. But it could have been, she realised, a young boy who had learned how not to be seen.
“He never would have told Allan,” she asserted.
“I don’t think any of you knew your children at all,” Ravyn said. “Real or adopted.”
Lillian smoothed down her skirt. “What is going to happen now, Chief Inspector? How much need be known?”
“Eventually, it will all become known,” Ravyn said. “We will locate the grave, exhume the body, and, if we can, determine the exact cause of death. When my final report is filed, your actions, as well as those of your friends, will be known to all. The truth can be hid for awhile, but rarely forever.”
Murder in the Goblins' Playground (DCI Arthur Ravyn Mystery Book 1) Page 18
