‘Mr Sutton says you went out for a walk with Janie the day before she disappeared. Did she say anything then that suggested she might go?’
She had to think about it.
‘That was the Sunday before…?’
‘Yes. The day after Daniel announced that he was engaged to Miss Smith.’
‘Oh yes. You can imagine the atmosphere in the house. Towards the end of the afternoon I had to get away from it for a while so I went down to the village and called in on the workshop. I did notice Janie looked pale and strained so I suggested we should go out for a little walk while he kept an eye on the baby. We didn’t talk much. I suppose I was too wrapped up in what was happening about Daniel to let her tell me her troubles.’
I said goodbye to Carol at the end of the drive and walked back down to the village.
Chapter Seventeen
I’D LIKE TO HAVE AVOIDED HIGH tea at Mrs Penny’s because I knew she’d want to gossip, but there was nowhere else to eat in the village. I dealt with the usual cold beef and pickles and her questions as briskly as I could and escaped with about an hour of daylight left, taking hat, coat and bicycle lamp with me. If Fardel was out there somewhere, he moved by night. It had been well after dark when he tried to get into the Crown, probably after dark too when the postmistress’s chicken was grabbed from its coop. The man had to eat and wanted to drink, so if I walked the lanes and footpaths at twilight and beyond, I’d have a chance of seeing him. No more than seeing him. I wasn’t stupid enough to think of tackling him: if I could find where he slept and cooked his stolen meals, Inspector Bull would have to carry on from there.
I turned off the main street and walked up a steep lane beside the churchyard. Once past the church it became a narrower track with a small oak wood on the left. From higher up the lane there was a view of the village with lamplight already glowing from a few windows, the street deserted. To the west, low hills sloped away into the valley of the Evenlode and the sun was setting in ragged pink streaks against dark grey cloud. On the other side of the hedge was an orchard, old neglected trees that might once have belonged to a cottage that didn’t exist any more. Still, one of them near the hedge had managed to produce an early crop of apples that glowed temptingly in the pink light. I stretched to pick one and started munching, looking out at the view. Something rustled behind the hedge. I jumped round, saw a pair of human eyes glinting at me and nearly choked. After the first shock I saw a man: small, shorter than I was, sixty or so and the front of his head where his cap was pushed back as bald and shiny as a hazelnut. Although I’d come out to find Fardel, I could almost have hugged the man for not being him.
‘I’m sorry. Are they your apples?’
Standing close up against the hedge, he had probably been watching me for some time. He was carrying a small oil lamp, the sort with a shutter that can be pushed round to hide the light.
‘Reckon you and me are at the same game, miss.’
He pushed through a gap in the hedge. There were wire loops and wooden pegs hanging from his belt. He was right: poachers, the pair of us.
‘Only I’m wasting my time,’ he said. ‘Summat’s got here before me.’ I saw a snare in the hedge, between two hazel branches. The peg had been pulled out of the ground and bits of rabbit fur were scattered all round it. A late-working fly buzzed round fragments of bright pink flesh the same colour as the sunset.
‘A fox?’ I said.
He shook his head, an odd look on his face like a man who both wanted to talk and didn’t at the same time.
‘Foxes carry knives where you come from, miss?’
‘Knives?’
He picked up a fur-covered hind leg and stretched it out between his blood and earth-stained hands. ‘See that? Bin cut, it has.’ And then, seeing I still didn’t understand, ‘Reckon he cut it up and are it raw.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know who, but he must have bin desperate hungry.’
Coincidence, of course, but the birds seemed to have stopped singing; the night had come suddenly.
‘Have you seen him?’ I said. ‘Was he a dark-haired man with broad shoulders?’
‘Might have been Old Nick for all I know.’
‘But have you seen him?’
He shook his head. ‘Reckon I’ve seen his lair, though.’
‘Where?’
He pointed back down the lane towards the little oak wood. ‘Old quarry up at the top there. Somebody had a fire in it a day or two ago.’
* * *
He merged back into the hedge and I followed the track back down to the coppice. Dusk was thick under the trees, the ground matted with brambles. I scrambled over the fence and went uphill, dry branches cracking underfoot, leaves swishing. If he were in there he’d hear me from half a mile away. After a while the ground levelled to a quarry floor with a rock face looming over it, about thirty feet high. It was only a small quarry, probably the source of stone for a cottage long ago. I hadn’t used the cycle lamp until then because there wasn’t much in the battery but I switched it on and found I was standing in a circle of grey ash. Bronze chicken feathers were scattered round, a clenched claw, bones. For one evening at any rate he hadn’t eaten his stolen meat raw. But if it had been his lair, it looked abandoned now. The ashes were cold, several days old and a few dry leaves had shifted over them. Oak leaves. Shrivelled brown oak leaves.
I suddenly felt shivery and wondered why. Of course there were dead oak leaves, this was a whole coppice of them. But I was seeing other leaves in my mind – dead leaves clinging to thick woollen stockings and red hair, the memory of them bringing back the metallic smell of blood so that I felt sick with it. The leaves on Daisy’s body had been dead oak leaves, like these. Why not? I tried to talk sense to myself, stop the shivering. After all, I’d already guessed that her body had been lying outside somewhere before it was put in the cabinet, possibly in the Venns’ garden. Only there weren’t any oak trees in or near the garden. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was. Yews, elms, hazels, but no oaks. Anyway it wasn’t the sort of garden where leaves were raked in tidy piles. The leaves that had fallen last autumn would have been smothered by now in a summer’s unchecked growth. It was only in woodlands that they’d still be thick on the ground. So Daisy’s body had at some time been in this wood, or in a wood like it. From here to the Venns’ house would be a good mile across country. Surely Felicia couldn’t have carried her body all that way. It would have taken a strong man. And if Daisy had been shot in the garden, as I’d thought, why move her body at all? The logic must be that Daisy was shot here in this place, or a place like it, and Fardel had been here.
* * *
I switched off the lamp and got myself out of the coppice. For the next few hours as the stars came out I covered miles of track and footpath, just able to see dark shapes of hedges or individual trees for guidance. The aim was to draw a rough circle round the village, assuming that Fardel would stay within walking distance of it. Every now and then I’d stop for some time and listen, but the countryside is a noisy place at night with sheep fidgeting behind hedges, badgers crashing and snuffling in the undergrowth, dogs barking from farms. Fardel could have been a dozen steps behind me and I might not have known it. I remembered a line from the song. Said my lord to my lady, as he mounted his horse: Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the moss. I wished my mind didn’t keep going back to it. Being nervous makes you tired, and by the time the church clock struck ten I’d had enough. I crossed a couple of fields, scrambled over a gate and got back to the road. The nearest buildings were the forge on one side of the road and the furniture workshop, both in darkness. I was looking towards the forge when I saw from the corner of my eye a flicker of movement across the road, towards the workshop. When I turned, whatever it was had gone. It had been too big for a dog or fox, too quick-moving for a lost cow. A human being, crossing the road. The hunting instinct stirred again. It had come and gone so quickly that it didn’t seem likely to be up to any
thing good. The workshop yard, crowded with piles of maturing timber, might look like a good hiding place, even somewhere to sleep for a man without a roof over his head.
Quietly I stepped off the road and into the yard, holding my breath, telling myself that at least Mr Sutton was within yelling distance if things went wrong. Total quiet and almost total dark. The man might have been crouching within arm’s reach of me, or away over the yard wall in a dark mass of bushes on the far side. If so, he’d moved remarkably quickly and quietly for a broad-shouldered drunkard. I waited, beginning to think I must be wrong about seeing a person at all. Then I heard a sound, not from where I expected it, but from inside the workshop. Footsteps, like somebody moving on tiptoe. The workshop door was on the far side of the building from me. I started moving towards it, then tripped over a wigwam of small planks. They fell with a noise like twenty school desk tops clattering and I went sprawling. As I fell, I heard the door on the other side slamming open, footsteps running up the street. A window opened overhead. Mr Sutton’s voice: ‘What’s going on?’
I reintroduced myself from my supine position among the planks. ‘Somebody’s just been in your workshop,’ I said.
By the time I’d picked myself up and got round to the door he was down in the workshop in trousers and jacket, shirtless underneath it.
‘What’s happened? Where’s he gone?’
‘Away up the street. Is anything missing?’
It could have been any thief, not my man necessarily. While Mr Sutton was getting an oil lamp alight my heartbeat and breathing slowed down.
‘Not disturbed much anyway,’ Mr Sutton said.
The workshop was much as I’d seen it a few hours before, the plate of congealed stew on the bench. A little painted chest stood in the corner, its lid open.
‘I never left it like that.’ Mr Sutton went over to it. Then, ‘The money’s gone.’
‘How much money?’
‘Fourteen pounds.’
A large sum, worth probably around two months’ wages for him, but he sounded hurt and puzzled rather than angry.
‘Shall I run and get the policeman?’ I said.
I’d no high hopes of Constable Johnson, but it was what you did when you were burgled, after all. Sutton shook his head, staring at the empty chest. I went over to look. It was neatly fitted out with a removable top tray, probably for sewing materials or a child’s toy soldiers. He pointed to a little gap between the tray and the back of the chest.
‘We kept it there. Sometimes there’d be a delivery of wood, expensive wood like good walnut or mahogany, and the carrier would want paying for it. You’d have to know it was there.’
‘Who knew?’
‘Just the three of us. Mrs Venn, of course, because it was her money, me and…’
He couldn’t say it.
‘Your wife? Janie?’
He nodded. His face was a painful mixture of hope and hurt. ‘But why would she do it? If she wanted money she could have every farthing in the place. Why would she sneak in and take it and not even talk to me?’
When I thought about it, the quickness of the figure flickering across the road, its quiet-footedness in the workshop, went with a woman more than a man. But I couldn’t answer his question. He stopped by a workbench, staring down at it.
‘My knife’s gone too, my favourite. You can see the gap where it was. She’d never have taken that from me, not of her own free will.’
A row of knives of various sizes, glinting frost sharp in the lamplight. He was right about the gap. He sat down heavily on a chest.
‘I’m going out to look for her,’ he said and disappeared upstairs. I waited until he came down again, fully dressed, and got his boots on, then walked out with him.
‘At least let me tell the constable.’
‘Waste of time.’
The two of us walked around the village for another hour or more, around outbuildings, up and down lanes. After midnight he said, sounding more dead than alive, ‘What I think, he must have made her tell him about the money first before he killed them. I’ll never see her again.’
I watched his dark shape fading back down the street, stumbling from tiredness. The village was quiet by then, the Crown long shut and all the lamps out. Under the stars it looked such a small huddle of life, the woods and fields round it steep and threatening in a way they weren’t by day. I got myself upstairs and huddled shivering under blankets and eiderdown.
Chapter Eighteen
I CAUGHT AN EARLY TRAIN IN the morning a few stops along the line to Chipping Norton. It was Thursday, a misty start to the day, elm leaves turning yellow, bright flares of rosehips along the embankments. The two women in my compartment were talking about making chutney before frost got the green tomatoes. Chipping Norton was a neat and busy little station. Across some fields a big woollen mill built of yellow brick and looking more like a mansion than a factory billowed clouds of steam from its ornate chimney. I asked directions to the police station in London Road and when I got there found Timothy Galway waiting outside. He raised his bowler to me, looking serious.
‘What’s happening?’
‘I’m sorry to tell you they’ve decided to charge Daniel. They’re bringing him in front of the magistrates in about an hour for a remand in custody. We shall ask for bail, of course, but frankly I don’t think we’ll get it.’
It turned out that the magistrates’ court was in the same building as the police station. Also in that same building, presumably, was some cell where Daniel was locked, all his bounding energy turned to a prisoner’s passivity. Adam had gone to leave the gig at a stables, Galway told me. He and I wished each other luck without any conviction that we’d get it. I went inside, gave my name to the duty officer and asked to see Inspector Bull. After a long wait a constable escorted me to a cramped room at the end of a corridor.
‘Well, Miss Bray?’ The inspector was on his own. He looked tired and harassed. The masthead of the Wrecker was poking out from a pile of papers on his desk.
‘There’s something I want to add to my statement. It’s about the revolver.’
If that surprised him, he gave no sign of it. I told him about hearing the shot and finding Felicia in the summerhouse with the gun, including my belief that she’d been trying to kill herself. All I left out was the presence of Bobbie.
‘Why didn’t you tell us this at once?’
‘Attempted suicide is a crime.’
‘Murder’s a worse one. You do agree with that, I suppose.’
‘Of course.’
‘So what made you change your mind, Miss Bray? What made you decide to take us into your confidence now?’
‘I suppose I’ve had a chance to think about it. People are naturally shocked when something like that happens.’
‘People may be, but when we first spoke to you, you seemed pretty cool. I seem to remember you even raised the question of rigor mortis. Why was that?’
‘Because I’d noticed most of her body was stiff when we took her out of the cabinet.’
‘Yes. So you were already calculating, weren’t you? I wonder why. Did you come to any conclusions?’
‘I’m no expert.’
‘But…?’
‘I’d guess she’d already been dead at least six hours then, probably more. And there’s something else. I’ve remembered that there were some dead oak leaves on her clothes when we took her out of the cabinet. Only a few of them. They might have fallen off by the time you saw her.’
‘Quite a lot of things might have happened before we saw her. What significance am I supposed to find in dead oak leaves?’
‘There are none anywhere near the Venns’ garden. I think she might have been shot some distance away.’
‘And put in the chest where you say you found her?’
‘Where I did find her, yes. I don’t know why, but I think that’s what happened.’
His expression gave me no idea whether my guess was right.
‘I dare say yo
u know now that your friend Daniel Venn has admitted to walking around all afternoon with a revolver in his pocket.’
‘He’s not my friend particularly. Two weeks ago I hadn’t even met him.’
‘Answer my question.’
‘I wasn’t aware you’d asked one.’
‘Are you aware that he says he had the revolver in his pocket all afternoon? Yes or no.’
‘Yes.’
‘So once he’s arrested and charged you suddenly decide it might be useful to spread a little confusion about when he did or didn’t have his hands on the gun and when and where Miss Smith might have been shot.’
‘Since I don’t know when or where she was shot, how could I know if it was useful?’
‘You’ve been trying to guess, though. You’ve been thinking about all this?’
‘Yes, of course I’ve been thinking about it.’
I think he was one of those people who use anger like a good rider uses his horse’s energy, reining it in then letting it go when it suits him. It suited him now.
‘Well, I’ve been thinking about it too. It’s what I’m paid to do, and I’m paid to do it on behalf of everybody. I do mean everybody. Not just people who happen to have money or powerful friends or nice table manners, or young women who’ve been to college and think that means they can pick or choose what laws it suits them to obey, or artistic young men who think they’ve got a licence to do what they like provided you can paint it or sing it or write poetry about it. I can assure you that I’m sick and fed up with the whole pack of you, and if I had my way you’d be standing down there in the dock alongside young Mr Venn for conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice.’
He paused for breath. There wasn’t a thing I could say in reply because I agreed with every word. He took a deep breath.
‘You realise you’re going to have to make a second statement about this?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you understand that you might be facing a charge of withholding evidence?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are there any more things that you happened to be too shocked to tell me at the time?’
Blood on the Wood Page 22
