The Hanging Tree

by Geraldine Evans

  He stared hard at the body and thought about the 'outing' threat. Although the first finding of the body with its macabre hood might be explained by the threat being carried to its ultimate conclusion, it didn't explain its removal and second appearance. He and Lilley had examined the surrounding area the night before, and checked missing persons in case the identification had been wrong. And although the branch had shown signs of damage, with a rope tuft still clinging determinedly to it, the body had certainly gone. Now here it was again; as large as life. Or death.

  Rafferty shivered again and turned to Lilley. 'I gather the warden found him?'

  Lilley nodded. 'That's him, guv.' He pointed to a middle-aged man sitting in one of the police cars. The warden had a sour face, the disapproval on the countenance set in concrete, as though he felt the whole scene, corpse, bustling coppers and all had been organised solely to discommode him.

  Rafferty sighed and tried to make allowances. The man had had a shock after all, he was bound to look a bit grim. Even so, he thought, he still looks a miserable bugg—.

  Sam Dally interrupted him before his charitable impulse was totally eroded. 'I'd say he's been dead something like twelve hours, which would fit in with what you told me.'

  'Reckon whoever strung him up the second time was hoping to pass it off as a suicide?' Rafferty asked.

  ‘ Need more than hope to bring it off, seeing as he had a bloody great stab wound in his back.' Sam pulled back the wrist cuffs on the tracksuit exposing weals on both wrists. 'A suicide who ties his own wrists?' he went on. 'You'd have to be one of life's eternal optimists to think you could convince anyone it was a DIY job.

  'Almost certainly died from the stab wound,' Sam added, 'as there are no petechiae in the conjunctiva as I'd expect from death by hanging, though confirmation of that will have to wait till I've done the post-mortem. We're a bit slack at the moment. The usual winter rush of customers hasn't materialised; must be waiting to see what Father Christmas brings them, so I'll fit him in straight after lunch.'

  Rafferty grimaced. That meant no lunch for him. Post-mortems made his stomach churn enough when it was empty. It had been touch and go at the last autopsy he had attended and he didn't want to risk it again. Sometimes, he suspected Sam deliberately timed the post-mortems on his cases for just after meals. He wouldn't put it past him.

  'You said on the phone that this is the second time he's been strung up,' Sam commented.

  Rafferty nodded. 'Same body, different tree. The first time, according to the witness, a Mrs ffinch-Robinson, who's a magistrate from Burleigh, no less, and a very reliable witness, it was hanging from that tree, over there.' Rafferty pointed to a venerable oak; huge and gnarled, it looked like it had been around since the beginning of time. 'Only by the time Lilley got here to investigate, the body had gone.'

  Rafferty told Sam the corpse's identity and about the 'outing' letter they had found. 'It looks very much as if someone's been playing Judge Jeffreys and Lord High Executioner combined. I don't like it.'

  An odd expression danced its way across Sam Dally's face as Rafferty finished his explanation. 'The original crossroads used to run by here,' Sam told him, ominously adding, 'legend has it that this,' he pointed to the gigantic oak, 'was the old Hanging Tree. One of them, anyway — in medieval times they generally put a beam across the branches of two trees and kicked away the ladder when the condemned was aloft.'

  Rafferty gazed at the tree with quickened interest. Oak trees always reminded him of elephants; he supposed it was the coarse, scored look of them. This one, even in the gloomy half-light under the branches, looked like the oldest elephant who had ever lived, a real Methuselah of an elephant, all criss-crossed skin, the individual diamond shapes standing out an inch and more from the flesh. It was an easy step to convince himself that it had a matching elephantine memory and, hidden deep in its trunk, it would have stored the name, face and emotions of every one of the hundreds of poor wretches it had helped despatch to the next world.

  'Used to string up witches, heretics and other individualists,' Sam continued. 'Though, as I said— ‘

  'Witches?' Rafferty interrupted. 'I thought they were always burned?'

  'Read your history books, laddie,' Sam advised. 'That was always more of a Scottish custom. It only became popular down here when Scottish Jimmy inherited the English throne in the early seventeenth century. A man with a mighty big fear of witches was old Jimmy One. Last century, by comparison, they were much less obsessed with punishing supposed witches and more into doing the dreaded deed to anyone who struck a Privy Councillor, damaged Westminster Bridge, or impersonated a Chelsea Pensioner. The list of punishments for which you could be hanged in the earlier part of the nineteenth century was long and merciless, I can tell you.'

  The latter description was much like Sam Dally, Rafferty reflected, as Sam, who always seemed to get great pleasure out of encouraging others' worst fears, added, 'For once, it looks as if your theory is bang on target. When it comes to your murderer, Lord High Executioner seems about the size of it. For your sake, I hope your killer isn't as determined to rid the country of rapists as James I was to rid it of witches and later monarchs of Chelsea Pensioner impersonators.'

  Such a possibility had already occurred to Rafferty, but he hadn't been willing to dwell on it. Now though, hearing it put into words by the far from fanciful Dally, he felt as though an icy hand had gripped his stomach and twisted it. His own unspoken concerns, taken together with Sam's robust observation, forced him to consider the worst case scenario in earnest: what if this killing wasn't simply a one-off act of revenge, but the beginning of a determined campaign? An "outing" campaign with a vengeance. One that didn't stop at threats of exposure and their follow-through.

  As Rafferty's guts practised reef knots, the tubby little doctor tortured him further. 'I know this looks like an unimportant little lane, now, but at one time, this was an ideal place to dangle corpses, educationally speaking. Before they built the modern highway across the fields, this was the main thoroughfare; one arm led, ultimately, to London, the opposite one to the port of Harwich, one to Elmhurst and its ancient Priory, the other to Colchester. It was a pretty busy road, too, by the standards of the time, with Walsingham pilgrims; merchants' carts with wool or woven cloth bound for continental markets, even royalty often travelled this way; Henry VIII's blonde bombshell younger sister, Mary, had a home at Woodbridge.'

  'What a mine of information you are today, Sam,' Rafferty commented morosely. 'What did you do, swallow an encyclopaedia for breakfast?'

  `'Not me; the wife's the one who swears by roughage. She's also the history buff. She's recently joined the Local History Society and she dragged me along to their last outing — said it should interest me as it was my line of country. Their treasurer, who has a rather suspect fascination with the more ghoulish side of history, brought us out this way. Anyway, he told us all the pretty little tales I've just told you; presumably on the principle of give 'em plenty of fascinatingly grisly stuff from the off and they'll stay and pay more subs. Play your cards right, Rafferty, and I might be able to wangle you an invite to their annual Iceni versus the Romans war games.'

  'Sounds just my kind of thing,' Rafferty murmured, wishing Sam had taken longer to recover his equilibrium. To his relief, the Coroner's Officer finally gave permission for the body to be moved and the Scenes of Crime team began to wrap it in its protective covering. He stamped his frozen feet in an attempt to encourage some life into them and wished the SOCOs would get a move on.

  Never one to waste a captive audience, Dally went on. 'Interesting chap, this treasurer wallah. Did you know that hanging, as an instrument of judicial execution, came to England by way of the Anglo-Saxons?'

  By now, numbed in mind and body, Rafferty merely shook his head.

  'Who, in turn, got it from their German ancestors. According to this lecturer, hanging became the established punishment for many crimes in the 12th Century when Henry II instituted tr
ial by jury and assize courts. You and I, Rafferty, have both cut down enough suicides to know it's not the swift, painless death most people imagine it to be. Hanging is a very difficult thing to carry out efficiently. It takes precision, expertise and plenty of practise to get all the variables correct; the length of rope, the weight and drop ratio, etc. Get 'em wrong and instead of breaking the bones of the cervical vertebrae, crushing the spinal cord and paralysing the body, the poor wretch slowly strangles to death.'

  Rafferty, who always tried to avoid thinking about the more upsetting details of death, made to interrupt, but Sam was well into his stride and not to be put off.

  'No, not a pleasant death. Many executions were botched jobs, of course. Some poor souls lingered for ages, slowly strangling to death. Ghastly business. Though, I suppose that was the whole point; make it as ghastly a spectacle as possible and you'll keep far more of the populace on the straight and narrow.' He rubbed his hand round his short neck feelingly and grinned. 'It would certainly have kept me a Simon pure.'

  'You were never a Simon pure,' Rafferty told him gruffly.

  'How little you know of your sainted man of medicine.' Sam's smile was benign, his tongue anything but, as he continued in the same sadistic vein. 'Sometimes, if the executioner was unusually kind or the family had the wisdom to bribe him well, he'd allow a member of the condemned’s family to pull on the victim's legs to hasten the end. Not very popular with the crowd, that, of course, they'd come to be entertained. Must have got their money’s-worth when the poor blighters were hanged, drawn and quartered.' His smile twisted slightly as he went on. 'I remember this chap told us of one particular execution where—'

  'Thank you, Sam.' Rafferty broke in forcefully before Sam launched into some other grisly anecdote. 'I think I've learned all I want to know about hanging for one day.' In his opinion, the sainted man of medicine was as much of a ghoul as the treasurer of the Historical Society. 'Anyway, according to you, this chap almost certainly didn't die by hanging. So—'

  'What's that got to do with it?' Sam demanded. 'You were the one who dragged executions into the conversation. And as the murderer seems to share your strange interest in hanging, I merely filled you in from my own extensive knowledge.'

  'Very good of you, I'm sure.'

  Thankfully, the corpse, now wrapped in his temporary modern winding sheet, was ready for the off. Rafferty spoke to the warden who had found the body, but as he seemed more concerned with sounding off about poachers and could tell them little more than when he'd found the cadaver, after thanking him, Rafferty, who had suffered more than enough lectures for one day, got in his car and bumped his way behind the Coroner's van back down the narrow lane.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Another triumph for British justice", the yellowing editorial of the Elmhurst Echo that had appeared the day after Smith's trial proclaimed on the front page, outrage from the previous day, understandably undiminished. Because Maurice Smith, self-confessed multiple rapist, had been freed on a legal technicality, in spite of his confession, in spite of testimony from his young victims, in spite of months’ of police work.

  How could it happen? everyone had asked. The victims' families, their MP's, all demanded an enquiry. But no matter how many voices were raised in a clamour for justice, this case was over. Maurice Smith was free to rape again.

  'And now he's dead, murdered.' Rafferty flung the yellowing newspaper he had brought from Smith's flat onto the table in the newly set-up Incident Room, and sat down heavily. 'And he had to die on our patch.'

  Lilley's identification had been correct, any doubt had soon been banished with the fingerprint evidence, which, as Smith had been in trouble before the failed rape trial, were still on file.

  Thank God we weren't the officers to make a botch of Smith's confession, Rafferty thought, as he stared at the expectant faces in front of him. His mind turned back to that morning, when Maurice Smith's body had been discovered for the second time and he had to force it back, force himself to concentrate on the here and now.

  It was some time later, with the team briefed and most dismissed to their house-to-house investigations, that Rafferty studied the remaining faces, before handing Hanks the list which he'd obtained from the police at Maurice Smith's old stamping ground of Burleigh.

  'These are the names and addresses of Smith's victims and their families. It's ten years old, so there may be divorces, house moves, remarriages. I want you to check out their current whereabouts. But be discreet. When you've confirmed their current addresses come back here. I don't want them questioned yet. Have you got that?' Hanks nodded and left the office.

  Rafferty turned his attention to Lilley and Lizzie Green. 'I want you two to go and ask around Smith's present neighbourhood. See if there've been any strangers hanging around, anything, in fact, that's out of the ordinary. His landlady was out that night. She was too upset when I broke the news to her earlier to be able to tell me much, so speak to her as well. She might have remembered something more now she's had a little time to get over the shock of Smith's death.'

  He handed over the plastic-enclosed envelope with its stencilled address. 'We know Maurice Smith was sent an 'outing' letter and according to Mrs Penny, Smith's landlady, the postman brought this envelope on the Wednesday morning before he died. She was able to identify the envelope and, as whoever sent it went to the extraordinary trouble of stencilling the address, it seems a likely supposition that it contained the 'outing' letter.'

  'But I thought Mrs Penny and Smith had separate letterboxes,' said Lilley. 'At least, that's what Smales-'

  'They do. But she said she generally waited for the postman.' Milkman, baker and candlestick maker, too, probably, Rafferty added silently to himself as he remembered how, on their first visit, she had continued to press more tea and buns on them in an attempt to extend their stay. 'She told me she took the post for both of them most days and was able to tell us that Smith never received handwritten letters - the hate mail ceased long ago, as we know from the postmarks. All he ever received were bills or official, typed letters from one government department or another. Anyway, on Wednesday, when she took the letter into her flat with her own post, she said she forgot all about it till Smith came in some time after eight that evening.'

  Smales grinned. 'That's her story and she's sticking to it, hey, guv? Bet she tried to steam the envelope open.'

  'That's what you'd do, is it?' Rafferty enquired dryly. 'What a pity for the investigation that not everyone shares your lack of scruples, Smales. And for your information, an envelope that's been steamed open has a bumpy, bubbly look to it when you reseal it and this one hasn't.'

  Thankfully, Smales didn't think to enquire how Rafferty had come by such knowledge and he hurried on before it occurred to him to do so. 'You might also ask Mrs Penny's near neighbours if they know when her back gate was damaged. Mrs Penny herself has no idea and, as it seems likely the damage could be tied to Smith's murder, I'd like to know for sure. Right, that's enough for you to make a start. Off you go.'

  Once the room had cleared, Rafferty turned to Llewellyn. 'As for you and me, we're going to see Smith's family.'

  In view of what they had already learned concerning their relationship with Smith, even Llewellyn, who abhorred the job of breaking news of death, approached the meeting with little trepidation. He had told Rafferty that he doubted Smith's relatives would be too heartbroken.

  It wasn't as if they were even what most people would regard as family proper, as Smith's father and mother had divorced when he was two, his father had disappeared into the wide blue yonder, and his mother had married again when Smith was four, producing a half-brother of the marriage eighteen months later. The mother had died shortly before the rape case had come to court, and now the only 'family' Maurice Smith had left was his stepfather and half-brother.

  The Bullocks, father and son, lived in a flat near the bus station, in conditions of squalor only too typical of all-male household; discarded chip w
rappings and other takeaway containers sharing the decorative honours with crushed lager cans and choked ashtrays. According to what Llewellyn had discovered during his last conversation with them, neither of them had a job.

  The television was on, the over-excited voice of a race commentator screamed at them. Rafferty asked for it to be turned off, and without awaiting permission, pressed the on-off button, and the maniacal voice was thankfully silenced. The son scowled at this interference, but Bullock said nothing, and simply sat back in his well-squashed armchair and awaited developments.

  Jes Bullock was a well-built man of fifty-seven and suited his name. His youthful muscles had turned to fat and now overhung his trousers. A thin veneer of politeness covered his natural aggression but it failed to mask the bully beneath. Rafferty took against him on sight; the thick sensual lips, the fingers like pork sausages, the slow, unhurried movements, all spoke of a man with tastes more physical than intellectual. Strangely, when Rafferty broke the news of his stepson's death, he seemed over-anxious to lay claim to a grief Rafferty judged him unlikely to be capable of.

  According to Smith's newspaper collection of that time, after the trial Bullock's voice had frequently been raised against his stepson, sprinkled through the anger had been the resentment that he was being blamed for the inadequacies of another man's son, insisting that Smith was 'no blood of mine'. It was obviously a grievance he still felt, but the circumstances and his own claim to the role of grief-stricken stepfather appeared to inhibit his previous free expression of it.

  He had little to say when Rafferty told him his stepson had died in less than natural circumstances. It was almost as if, beyond the insincere mouthings of loss, he was keeping a guard on his tongue. Rafferty wondered why he should feel it necessary.