Blood on the Wood

by Gillian Linscott

  I went on to the end of the street and stopped outside the furniture workshop. A lad was out in the yard, stacking pieces of seasoned oak. Through a window open to the street I could see Mr Sutton leaning over, planing something. I hesitated to bother him but although he had his back to me he must have sensed that I was there. He whirled round with such a look of hope on his face that I thought he must be seeing somebody behind me. But there was nobody. The hope died away and his face crumpled like a kicked paper lantern. The plane clattered to the floor. By the time I got inside he was kneeling down in the pale wood shavings, head bent, forehead against the wood he’d been planing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t meaning to spy on you.’

  There was nobody else in the workshop.

  ‘Janie,’ he said, to the wood, not to me. It came out as the kind of groan tree branches make, rubbing against each other in a gale. ‘Every time there’s someone there, I think it’s Janie.’ He levered himself upright and sat down on a block of wood. ‘She’s been gone more than a week now.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He looked at me, as if he couldn’t get me or anything else into focus. ‘You’re Mrs Venn’s friend, aren’t you? You were there that day it started.’

  ‘What started?’

  ‘That cabinet. I’ve never liked black oak, never liked it. Poor Janie was so scared of it. You saw that?’

  She’d been scared, no doubt about it, but looking back I wasn’t sure if it had been of the cabinet itself. But I said nothing because he was in such a tightly stretched state of nerves it looked as if even the slightest extra strain would spring him apart. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for days and his hands were shaking so much it was surprising he could operate the plane.

  ‘And then the two of them singing that song, about a baby being tormented and a woman killed. How could anybody sing a song like that? There was a curse on the thing. I should never have let it in the workshop. I’d have burned it to ashes in the yard if I’d known, damn whether it was valuable or not.’

  ‘A curse on the cabinet?’

  ‘Why not? You can build love into a piece of furniture, I know that because I’ve done it. If you can build love in you can build hate as well. Somebody carved that thing with hate in his hands. If I had him here…’

  He jumped up, grabbed a chisel from a bench and started tearing jagged runnels into the piece of wood he’d been planing, ugly and random. The torn wood looked terribly like flesh drawing back from the edges of a wound. Tears were running down his face. ‘They say the poor girl was in it, actually inside it. Is that true?’

  I nodded. He stared at the slashes in the wood as if somebody else had made them and came back to sit down.

  ‘At least her family knows what’s become of her. I might never know what’s happened to Janie or the baby. Just gone off, that fool of a policeman says. Women just go off and you can’t do anything about it. Janie wasn’t like that. Where would she go? Who would she go to?’

  ‘Can you think of any reason why she’d go?’

  He looked away, going red. ‘Are people gossiping then?’

  ‘If they are, I haven’t heard any.’

  ‘I’d done no harm to her. She was happy with the baby and we had a good roof over our heads. Mrs Venn had set us up nicely so I could do the work I always wanted to do. We had everything to look forward to, then like a fool I let that black oak in my shop.’

  ‘When did she go?’

  ‘The Monday. She got me my breakfast as usual. I had to get that damned – excuse me – the cabinet up to the house, then go on over Chadlington way to see a customer. When I got back in the afternoon, she’d gone.’

  Monday. The day Daisy died.

  ‘Did she leave a note?’

  ‘No note. She’d taken a shawl and a blanket and some clothes for the baby and left a couple of slices of bread and cheese on a plate with a cloth over them for my lunch. Why did she think I’d eat lunch with her and the baby gone?’

  ‘If she took the shawl and things…’

  ‘That’s what Constable Johnson says. If she took the things with her, that shows she wasn’t forced away against her will. It’s all very well for him to talk. I know Janie and he doesn’t.’

  I supposed but didn’t say that every husband ever deserted thought he knew his wife. But it was undeniable that on the Saturday afternoon, something had scared Janie very much.

  ‘Was she all right on the Sunday?’

  ‘Thinking back, she was a bit on the quiet side but she gets tired with the baby so I didn’t think much to it. In the afternoon Mrs Venn called and the two of them went for a bit of a walk together.’

  ‘Janie and Carol.’

  ‘Mrs Venn’s always been very kind to Janie. They go out together sometimes to pick leaves and flowers for Mrs Venn to paint. Anyway, she came back still a bit pale and quiet and I said she should go upstairs and rest, so she did.’

  ‘And no mention to you of being worried about anything?’

  ‘Never a word. But I think she was still brooding about that black oak and the song.’

  He was calmer now, so I risked the question.

  ‘So what do you think happened to her?’

  ‘What do I think? I think she’s been killed by whatever monster killed that other poor girl, that’s what I think.’

  We stayed there in silence, he sitting with arms hanging and head bent. Then a woman’s voice called softly from outside the window, ‘Your dinner, Mr Sutton.’

  She was a kindly plump woman carrying a white soup plate with another one upside down on top of it. She put them down on a bench with sorrowful care, like a person placing a wreath on a tomb. ‘Any news?’ she asked him.

  ‘No news.’

  * * *

  The lad was still stacking wood in the yard. I asked him where Mr Bestley the carter lived and he pointed up a lane beside the forge. There was just the shadow of an idea in my mind and I wanted to test it. It was around midday and the blacksmith was taking a rest.

  ‘Going up to old Bestley?’ Then, when I said I was, ‘If you want any civility out of him, you might try taking a bit of baccy.’

  So I went back to the shop again, bought an ounce of shag tobacco and took it past the forge and along the lane. There were two deep parallel wheel ruts all along it, already getting overgrown with grass and pineapple weed. The ruts ended in a yard with an empty stable on one side of it and a lean-to on the other with the carter’s wagon inside. A cottage closed off the third side of the yard, a little worse for wear with pennycress growing from gaps in the rough stone walls. Some stone tiles missing from the roof had been replaced with tin cans hammered flat. I knocked on the door. There was a sound of somebody moving about inside then, ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘A visitor,’ I said. Then, blessing the smith’s foresight, ‘I’ve brought you some tobacco.’

  I heard a dragging sound and a voice moaning to itself. The door opened into a dim space like a ship’s cabin. Possibly at one time it had been a normal-sized cottage room, but all sides of it were stacked from floor to ceiling with empty boxes and packing cases with just two spaces for a small window in one wall and a fireplace in another. In the middle of the room was a nest of blankets and old curtains that might possibly have a chair somewhere underneath, with an elderly dog on the carpet beside it, peering at me suspiciously from filmy eyes. Mr Bestley stood leaning against the doorframe, stick in hand, right foot so swaddled in dirty cloth it looked three times its normal size.

  ‘I’m staying with Mrs Penny,’ I said. ‘I heard you’d been hurt.’

  Luckily, he seemed to take the interest as no more than his due.

  ‘I can’t stand up for long. If you want to talk you’ll have to come in and sit down.’

  I held the tobacco in its twist of paper so that he could see it, but didn’t hand it over. The lure of it and the chance to talk about his bad luck to a new audience were irresistible. Slowly he went over and settled into th
e nest-like chair, indicating that I should draw up a packing case and sit down. I handed the tobacco over. He tipped some of it into the palm of a hand that looked as tough as saddle leather, stirred it with his finger and sniffed mournfully, as if to say it wasn’t much good but the best that life was likely to put his way.

  ‘Staying with her, are you? I might have married her myself only she liked another man better. She’s been widowed ten years any road.’

  He said it with gloomy satisfaction. Even before the accident he probably hadn’t been one of the cheery whistling types of carter.

  ‘I’m a friend of the Venns,’ I told him. (I wasn’t sure about that, but he’d need some explanation.) ‘I believe you delivered the black oak cabinet to them last Monday week.’

  ‘That dratted thing. There’s a curse on it. First the poor gal gets killed, then Sutton’s wife takes herself off, then it’s my poor foot.’

  ‘But I thought you dropped a hammer on your foot.’

  ‘I did, but it happened the day after we carted that bleeding cabinet and if I hadn’t been weakened from the weight of it I might not have dropped the hammer.’

  He took a short-stemmed clay pipe out of his pocket, filled and lit it. Blue smoke drifted up to a ceiling kipper-coloured from years of nicotine. The dog put its head on his knee and he stroked it.

  ‘Blind as a bat and deaf as a post. Fine pair, him and me.’

  After a few long drags on the pipe he told his story. He’d taken the cob down to the forge for shoeing the day after they delivered the cabinet to the Venns’ house, tried to help the smith by handing him a hammer and dropped it on his foot. No bones broken and – in spite of Mrs Penny’s gloating predictions – no signs of gangrene or delirium. But enough to keep him off work for several weeks.

  ‘And you think it’s because the black cabinet brought bad luck?’

  ‘Well, for certain it didn’t bring anybody good luck, did it? Is it true they found the poor gal’s body inside it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  No surprise that the story had got round the village.

  ‘It had a hanged man on it. Saw it myself.’

  ‘Did you look inside when you moved it?’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking was the gal inside it when we moved it out of Sutton’s place. Everybody wants to know that. Well, she wasn’t. I looked inside because the door came open when we were trying to shift it and it was as empty as a pauper’s stomach.’

  ‘Did the police ask you about that?’

  ‘Police? What would the police be wanting with me? All I did was help shift it and that isn’t a job I’d do again in a hurry.’

  ‘Yes, it looked heavy.’

  ‘Heavy! It was as much as the three of us could do to get it into the house. Up the steps to the front door and then Mrs Venn wants it taken all the way through the house and—’

  ‘Three of you? That’s you and Mr Sutton and who else?’

  ‘Bloke I took on for the day. I knew we were in for a bit of heavy work, and he was hanging round by the forge, so I said did he want to earn himself a couple of bob. She’d pay all right, I knew that. Without him, we’d still be there trying to shift it now.’

  ‘This other man, was he from the village?’

  ‘No. Never seen him before or since.’

  ‘A tramp?’

  ‘Not what you’d call a tramp exactly. You get a lot of casual workers coming in for the harvest and I took him for one of them. All the same to me if he could do the job.’

  ‘And he did?’

  ‘Oh yes, strong enough.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘What do you mean, then what?’

  ‘This man, he helped you carry the cabinet inside.’

  ‘Yes, that was the whole point of it. I said to Mrs Venn I’d had to promise him a couple of bob, and she gave me a half-crown to give to him. I gave it to him when we’d finished and off he went.’

  ‘You didn’t see where?’

  ‘Didn’t care either. He’d done his job and we were in a hurry to get off. I had something to collect from Chadlington and Walter Sutton was getting a ride with me, so the two of us went off and that was that.’

  ‘This other man, what did he look like?’

  He thought and smoked for a while.

  ‘Ordinary sort of fellow.’

  ‘Dark? Fair? How old?’

  ‘Dark, definitely dark. Not young and not old either. Maybe thirtyish. Not what you’d call respectable looking, needed a shave and a change of shirt, but not ragged. Bit down in the mouth.’

  ‘What about his voice?’

  ‘Didn’t say much. He wasn’t from round here.’

  It wasn’t much of a description, but I was certain all the same. I said goodbye to him and practically ran up the street. Long Lankin, the demon figure from the song, was now flesh and blood. I had no proof that the man thrown out of the Crown was Daisy’s uncle, Fardel. No proof either that he was one and the same as the dark-haired man who’d helped carry the cabinet. But I’d have bet my last shilling on it. He’d actually set foot in the Venns’ house, handled the cabinet where Daisy’s body was found. If I’d analysed the reason for my excitement – which I didn’t – it would have been that we were all off the hook, no more doubts and dilemmas. Something evil had walked in on our lives, killed and walked out again.

  I was making for the Venns’ house to tell Daniel and didn’t intend to waste time by calling in at Mrs Penny’s. But as I walked past her cottage there was a sharp tap-tapping from inside her window. She was looking out at me, waving a letter. Reluctantly I stopped and she opened the window and put her head out.

  ‘Looking all over the place for you, he was. Said it was urgent.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Venn’s driver.’

  She gave me the letter. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper and two lines in black ink, not with Daniel’s signature as I’d expected, but Adam’s.

  ‘Police arrested Daniel early this morning. Please come as soon as you can.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘AS I TURNED IN AT THE Venns’ drive their gig overtook me, with Adam driving it at a fast trot and the roan horse hot and sweaty. A tall man was sitting beside him; both of them wore dark suits and bowler hats. Carol was waiting at the front door. The tall man got down and shook hands with her. Adam said something I didn’t hear, turned the gig and drove it away down the side of the house, probably to the stable yard.

  When I got to the door Carol introduced the thin man as Timothy Galway, the solicitor friend from London who knew about criminal work. I liked the look of him. He was in his thirties, calm and measured in the way he moved but with observant eyes. I imagined him as a fly-fisherman, standing long hours beside a river, then the sudden silver dash of a trout pulled into the air. His hair was brown with a hint of red to it, enough for interest but not so much as to startle the customers.

  ‘Mr Galway wants to talk to all of us.’

  She was trying hard to be calm, but looked as tight-stretched as the paper over a circus hoop. I waited in the dining room while Carol took Galway upstairs. There was dust on the walnut surface of the table and the posy of white rosebuds in the middle had dried out and hardened like flowers in an undertaker’s window. After a while Adam came in, smelling of horse sweat and saddle soap.

  ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘Have they charged him?’

  It was all very well to decide I should keep my distance from the Venns, but it was impossible to be in the same house with them and not share the worry. Worse than worry now. It was something like cold panic, as if all our attempts to keep this thing in control had failed and we were sitting in a carriage with the reins snapped and the cliff edge just in front of us.

  ‘Not yet, but Galway thinks we should be prepared for it later today.’

  ‘There’s something I’ve just found out. It may help.’

  I was starting to tell him about Fardel when O
liver Venn came in, shuffling in embroidered slippers. The veins on his forehead showed blue through skin as thin and dry as slivers of birch bark. Carol and Timothy Galway came in behind him and we all sat down at the table. Galway glanced at Adam, who nodded to him to go ahead.

  ‘The position is that Daniel has not yet been charged with anything, but they are holding him for questioning in connection with Miss Smith’s killing. He will probably be kept in a police cell overnight and if they do decide to charge him they’ll have to bring him before the magistrates for a remand in custody.’

  Oliver said, ‘Keep him locked up? They can’t do that, can they?’

  Adam told him quietly that yes, they could. I asked how Daniel was.

  ‘Reasonably composed in the circumstances,’ Galway said.

  ‘He’s dazed,’ Oliver said. ‘You could see from his face when they took him away this morning. The poor boy just doesn’t know what’s happening to him.’

  His hand on the table was clenched and trembling. Carol laid her hand over it, trying to calm him. Galway waited, then went on in the same level voice.

  ‘Adam has asked me, quite reasonably, what we can do to help Daniel. I’ve already told the inspector that I don’t think he’s justified in arresting him, but on the facts as I know them so far it wasn’t an easy argument for me.’

  Oliver opened his mouth to protest but Carol gave a little shake of her head and he closed it.

  Galway went on, ‘The first thing to say is that Daniel firmly and consistently denies killing Miss Smith, both to the police and to me. Unfortunately some things the police have discovered and the way they’ve come to light makes them believe they have a case.’

  Adam said, looking straight ahead and sounding as if the words came painfully, ‘The fact is, Timothy believes we’ve all made some bad mistakes already, me especially.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you, Adam,’ Galway said. ‘Goodness knows, I probably wouldn’t have done any better if it had been my brother. But not to put too fine a point on it, the inspector believes you’re all in a conspiracy to protect Daniel – you too, I’m afraid, Miss Bray – and it’s not going to be easy to convince him otherwise.’ He looked round the table at each of us in turn, taking his time. ‘For a start, there’s the matter of the revolver.’