‘He called her what?’ Daniel jumped up. His face was so close to my own that I could feel the heat of his breath and he looked furious. ‘I’m supposed to have been in a cart shed with Felicia and called her Flissie?’
‘Were you?’
‘Listen, this is important. If I’d never told the truth before in my life I’d be telling it now. I’ve never, as it happens, on any occasion been in any cart shed with Felicia. More than that, I’m totally and utterly incapable of calling her Flissie.’
The depth of loathing he put into the last two syllables spattered my face. He apologised and took a step back, but still looked furious.
‘Why not?’
‘Just think about it. I’m a musician. What I do best is setting words to music. That means you have to like words, hear the music in them. About the first thing I said to Felicia’ was that she had a beautiful name. It practically sings itself.’ He sat down again, played and sang ‘Fel-ic-i-a’, the four syllables clear and high as a blackbird’s song. ‘Then I’m supposed to have called her Flissie. Fliss-ee. Listen to it. Like a coster-monger whistling to his dog. I hate it when the others call her that. I tell you, I may be guilty of all kinds of stupidity, I may even be guilty of murder if you like, but I could never, ever be capable of uttering an atrocity like Flissie.’
He took a deep breath and sagged with his head just above the keys. The ridiculous thing was that I believed him. But then I’d believed Sally too and, looking back, I still did.
* * *
I left him there, let myself quietly out of the front door and went back down the road to the village. The key to Mrs Penny’s cottage was under the geraniums as promised. There was no sign of her but a fat marmalade cat kept me company and cadged scraps while I ate cold beef with home-made piccalilli and drank very stewed tea at the kitchen table. Afterwards I went upstairs and after a long struggle managed to persuade the old oil lamp on the washstand to give out just enough light to read by. I’d brought a pile of papers and magazines from London with me and one of them happened to be Hawthorne’s publication the Wrecker. I sat down on the bed with it, turning pages idly until I came to something that made me sit up. It had a panel to itself and was headed, in bold black type, A TALE OF MODERN TIMES. I read on, fearing the worst, and got it.
Once upon a week ago in a not far away county – let us call it Oxfordshire – a handsome young prince went looking for a bride. His princely choice fell on a beautiful girl with long red hair – let us call her Daisy—who played the violin and sang and danced better than anybody else in the kingdom. So the handsome young prince took her away from her friends and said to his family, “This is the princess I am going to marry.’ But his family were proud and wealthy. They said, ‘She is no princess, for all that she sings and plays the violin and dances better than anyone in the kingdom. She is born of the working classes and has no money.’ So they killed the red-haired girl, and the young prince was sad for a while, but soon found himself another bride who was not beautiful and could not sing or dance or play the violin but was born of the upper classes and had a lot of money. This is a true story, gentle reader, but you will not find it in any of your other so-called newspapers, because if they were to print it people might ask questions which would anger other people in high places – such as whether it is right that girls should be killed because they come from the working classes and have no money or what the police in Oxfordshire – led by a wise and kindly Inspector with a name something like Ox – are doing to put the murderers of the girl in prison. But then, if you think our brave boys in blue will ever defend the rights of the working classes against the taking classes, then you really do believe in fairy tales.
If anything had been needed to make matters worse, this was it. Hawthorne’s total disregard for the laws of libel was notorious and had already caused two or three publications to sink under him, but this was beyond his worst. If Inspector Bull had read it – and I wouldn’t put it past Hawthorne to have posted a copy to him – it explained the bad temper Daniel had noticed.
Soon after that the little supply of oil in the lamp gave out so I got undressed in the dark and dozed. It was an uneasy doze because my room was just opposite the public house. Although the village was quiet by day, the pub in the evening seemed to be a magnet for men from miles around. Heavy boots tramped up and down the street, voices called out cheerful insults in local accents to friends leaving or arriving. As the evening went on there was some singing, all of it music hall songs, nothing to excite the folk-song collectors. Even though the noise stopped me from sleeping it was pleasant enough in its way and I half listened to the comings and goings to stop my mind tramping round in the familiar circles about Daisy. All of a sudden something very different from the rest of the noise jolted me into full wakefulness. One pair of heavy boots marching, like the rest, up the street towards the pub. A man singing as he came, already sounding as if he’d had a drink or three. But it was what he was singing that set my heart thumping: ‘A varmer he lived in the West Countree, And he had daughters one, two and three.’
I made a jump for the window, but by the time I got there the singing had stopped and all I could see was the back of a man silhouetted against the yellow lamplight from the pub doorway. Then the door closed on him. I started getting into my clothes, scrabbling in the dark for skirt and blouse, with no plan in my mind except to see the man and talk to him. A woman hurtling into the public bar would scandalise the village but there was no help for it. Buttons done up skew-whiff, not bothering with stockings, I dived under the bed, looking for my second shoe.
It was while I was under there that the fighting started. I heard the pub door opening, a roar of protest, a shout of, ‘I told you to get out and stay out!’ The crash of my head against the bed frame drowned the next few words and by the time I’d stopped seeing stars and shuffled over to the window the fight was down to ground level, with what looked like two or three men wrestling on the pub doorstep and others standing round shouting. Presumably one of the fighters was my singer, but there was nothing to distinguish him in a writhing mass of arms, legs and backs. A cry went up ‘Police! Police coming.’ The writhing mass became vertical and a man tore himself away from it and ran heavily down the street. Within a few strides he’d gone beyond the light from the pub doorway and into darkness. I found my shoe, went downstairs as quickly as I could in the dark and let myself out on to the street. There was still a lot of excitement round the pub doorway, but no sign of a policeman, so that had probably been somebody’s bright idea to break things up.
‘… told him last night I didn’t want him in here.’
‘Not us owes him money, any road.’
‘Bit me. Bugger tried to bite my ear off.’
I ran past them, down the street in the direction the man had gone, but the time it had taken me to find my shoe and get downstairs had given him two minutes’ or so start. Soon I was through the village and on a country road with hedges both sides, nothing but darkness beyond. He could be anywhere, in a ditch not far from where I was standing or out in the fields, and much though I wanted to speak to him it made no sense to track a violent man across country on my own.
More slowly I went back up the street to the pub. Men were still standing and talking outside and by this time they’d recovered enough from the excitement to notice me. When I came into the light and they saw I was a stranger they stopped talking, startled rather than hostile.
‘Good evening, miss,’ one of them said. He looked like the landlord, a big plump man with a brown apron over his clothes.
‘I’m lodging with Mrs Penny,’ I said. ‘I heard a noise so I thought I’d better come down and see what was happening.’
They relaxed, relieved I was accounted for.
‘I’m sorry you’ve had your sleep broken, miss,’ the landlord said, ‘but there’s nothing for you to worry about. Just a ruffian trying to push himself in where he’s not wanted.’
‘A local man?’
‘Was he by any chance a big tall man with a beard?’
‘Why, are you looking for one of they?’
That from a man in the doorway who seemed more drunk than the rest. They shushed him.
‘No,’ the landlord said. ‘Broad in the shoulder but not big out of the common and no beard. Stubble, but no beard.’
Not Harry Hawthorne, then. Even if he’d shaved off his beard he couldn’t change his size. I asked what he’d done to get banned from the pub.
‘He’s got a nasty temper,’ the landlord said. It set off a chorus from the others.
‘And he keeps trying to cadge drinks off people.’
‘Stole me drink once, he did, nearly whole pint left there was.’
‘That’s right, pinches people’s pints off the bar when he thinks they’re not looking, then starts a fight when you pick him up on it.’
‘And keeps on about people owing him money.’
More to keep the conversation going than anything, I picked up on the last remark. ‘One of these men owed a fortune, is he?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know about a fortune, miss. Time I heard it, it was twenty pounds.’
The others chorused that was right, supposed to be twenty pounds. They were fidgeting now, night air cold and bladders full probably, wanting the conversation to end. I wished them good night and they drifted away up and down the street. The landlord hoped I’d sleep better now all that was over and went back inside. I let myself into the house opposite and locked the door behind me. Mrs Penny was still snoring in her room. With luck, she might not know about my nocturnal gallivanting, but villages being villages I couldn’t depend on that. Anyway, there was something else bothering me more. The man had been quite specific, several times over, about the amount he was owed – twenty pounds. Consistency was unusual in a violent drunk. The sum was unusual too. If a man of that kind thinks he’s owed money it’s either a modest shilling for the next drink or untold thousands he should have inherited and didn’t. Twenty pounds was either too big or too small for the pattern. I undressed again, got under the sheets and blankets, and slept.
Some time later, while it was still dark, I was suddenly broad awake again because I’d remembered when I’d last heard of somebody wanting twenty pounds. Daniel Venn had told me: ‘… he said I could have her for twenty pounds’. The price of Daisy.
Chapter Fifteen
‘SERVE HIM RIGHT,’ MRS PENNY SAID when I told her I’d heard a man being thrown out of the Crown. ‘Tramp, probably. We get more of those than a dog has fleas.’
I hadn’t slept much and was up and dressed by six, but she and her cat were in the kitchen before me. She poured me a cup of tea, spread a hunk of farmhouse loaf with butter and put an egg on to boil.
‘There’s no bacon on account of Bestley’s foot. Swollen up purple and yellow.’ She went into a lot of medical details involving the probability of gangrene, delirium and amputation.
I ate my egg and walked out to the village street. It was a fine morning, a smell of fresh bread and ripe apples over everything, swallows twittering around and getting ready to migrate. I spoke to a couple of farm labourers on their way to work, a woman scrubbing her front step, a man delivering bread from a pony cart. They’d all of them seen tramps around over the past few weeks, but there was nothing unusual about that. A lot of them had their familiar rounds, going from workhouse to workhouse, picking up the occasional odd job or piece of charity in between. But they hadn’t noticed anything unusual in the way of tramps in the last day or two and my description – broad shoulders, stubble, average build – could have applied to almost any of them. Later, when the shop-cum-post-office opened I took my place in the queue. It was only the size of a small parlour and with half of it taken up by the counter and a woman and man in front of me I could just about wedge into the corner beside the broom handles and scrubbing boards.
The woman at the counter was weighing out two ounces of tea, carefully and slowly, for an old dear who was saying that girls who got killed probably did something to deserve it. The man gave his opinion that it was probably some of them anthiests from Manchester. It took me a while to realise he was talking about the Scipian camp, presumably merging atheists and anarchists in general suspicion. He’d come to collect some boots that had gone to town for mending, but was disappointed. Bestley’s foot again. It seemed to be having a disastrous effect on the village economy. The name struck a chord and I remembered that Mr Bestley was the village carter who’d taken the cabinet up to the Venns’ house. When it came to my turn I bought a pair of bootlaces and a packet of chocolate. As it seemed to be the local custom I enquired after Bestley’s foot and was told he’d dropped a hammer on it last week. After more chat about the weather and hiking I mentioned that I was staying with Mrs Penny and there’d been a bit of trouble outside the Crown last night. The shopkeeper was inclined to resent it at first as a slur on the village. (Murder, it seemed, was acceptable but public house fights might lower the tone of a place.)
‘I think the troublemaker was an outsider,’ I said. ‘He didn’t sound like a local man.’
‘We’ve had a lot of those around in the past couple of weeks.’
I hadn’t understood till then how the Scipian camp had been resented. The rumours of what was going on up there had been bad enough, but entertaining at least. The worst of it was that the Scipians had spent very little money in the village at the shop, pub or bakery. So, as the village saw it, the Scipians got all the sin and the locals got none of the profits. I might have explained that the camp, from what I’d seen of it, had been as virtuous as a Sunday school outing and if the Scipians hadn’t spent money it was because they hadn’t got much. But I just said the man hadn’t sounded like one of those to me.
‘There are tramps about,’ the woman behind the counter said. ‘One of them got a chicken of ours two nights ago. Johnson tried to make out it was a fox. I said, don’t you give me fox. What fox you ever heard of could unlatch a coop and take a hen out of it without fuss or feathers?’
This sounded more promising. If Fardel had been in the area nine or ten days without money, he’d have to eat.
‘Is Mr Johnson your husband?’
She made a derisive noise. ‘No, thank God. Constable Johnson at the police house.’
Inspector Bull had brought his own constable with him from outside. There’d been no mention of a Constable Johnson. I paid for my things and asked where the police house was.
‘The other side of the school. You’ll know it from the dahlias.’
She was right. The lower floor of the little stone cottage was almost hidden by a breaking wave of reds and yellows and purples. Above the front door, just visible, a new stone plaque with the county arms was the only sign that this was the law’s residence. Among the flowers, a red-faced man in his fifties straightened up and looked at me. He was in waistcoat and shirtsleeves and holding a flowerpot stuffed with straw. I wished him good afternoon and said I was staying in the village, a friend of the Venn family. His face clouded.
‘I’m sorry for what’s happened to them, miss. Mrs Venn’s always been good to the village.’
‘The old Mrs Venn or the young one?’
‘Both, miss.’
My guess that the village policeman had little if anything to do with the murder investigation seemed right. I admired his dahlias and he invited me in through the gate to see them. Earwigs were a pest, he said. His big red fist jerked the straw out of the flowerpot into a bucket of water on the path. Earwigs burst out of it into the water, rowing uselessly with hundreds of legs. Again, I mentioned the trouble outside the Crown. He’d heard about it, no more. As for tramps, he knew most of the regulars in his area and thought them harmless on the whole. No new ones had come to his notice over the past couple of weeks.
‘The woman at the shop thin
ks a tramp stole one of her chickens,’ I said.
His expression showed what he thought of the woman at the shop. His big hand hovered over a yellow explosion of bloom, delicately twitched off a single petal, earwig-nibbled.
‘Drive you mad it would, sometimes. I retire with a pension this time next year and it can’t come a day too soon for me. They all want you to find their dogs or their chickens or their wives and it’s you they blame if you can’t, not whoever it is who went off with their wives or their dogs or their chickens in the first place.’
‘You count wives along with the rest of the livestock?’ I was annoyed but luckily he didn’t realise that.
‘You don’t, that’s what I have to explain to them. A chicken or a dog or a horse, that’s your possession and if somebody takes it, he’s committed an offence. It’s not the same with a wife. Like it or not, she’s a free person in law and if she decides to take herself off of her own free will or go off with somebody else, you can’t send a policeman to fetch her back. You might not like it, but that’s the law.’
From the way he said it, I guessed he’d made that little speech recently to somebody else. Come to think of it, I’d heard a bit of gossip recently about a man’s wife leaving him.
‘Mr Sutton the woodworker?’
Carol Venn had mentioned it. He nodded and turned back to his flowers, dutifully unwilling to talk about a particular case. I thanked him, said I hoped the frost would come late this year for the sake of his dahlias and went back to the main street to go on with the discouraging search. I went up and down in the morning sun, talking to women standing at open doors, old men gossiping by the pump. One man had seen a dark figure slinking into a copse around twilight about a week ago – but he couldn’t remember when exactly, only saw him from a field away and thought he was probably a poacher. Apart from that, nothing.
Blood on the Wood Page 19
