A Cruel Necessity (A John Grey Historical Mystery)

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘That would be jumping to conclusions on the basis of very little evidence,’ says the Colonel. ‘What do people like us know of ciphers anyway?’

  I do in fact know quite a lot about ciphers but wonder if it would be polite to correct the Lord of the Manor so abruptly.

  ‘He has special codes for General Harrison and another general,’ I say.

  ‘Monck,’ says the Colonel.

  ‘I’ve heard of Harrison. He was cashiered and imprisoned, was he not? Who is Monck?’

  ‘Commander in chief in Scotland,’ says the Colonel. As a soldier he knows that. He’s probably served with or fought against anyone in England who can call themselves a general. ‘Monck was a Royalist once, but not any more. One of Lord Protector Cromwell’s best and most trusted commanders. Unlike that dangerous fanatic Harrison.’

  Well, at least I know who Monck is now. An important man it would seem. Harrison was important also once, but Cromwell is ruthless with those who cross him. Harrison is now almost as forgotten at Westminster as Colonel Payne must be.

  I try to explain to the Colonel about the dead man’s wound and the lack of blood on the ground close by. ‘And he was killed some time after midnight,’ I add. ‘Or at least the body was most certainly dumped at the dung heap after midnight. There was dew on the ground beneath it.’

  I expect the Colonel to nod sagely and compliment me on my observation, but he seems to be preoccupied with his fallow deer, which are grazing just beneath us, outside in the Park. When he turns again, he just says: ‘You say you saw Ifnot Davies out this morning?’

  ‘He needed more fuel. I imagine he was on his way to the charcoal burners’ huts in the wood to bespeak another load.’

  ‘Why is he called Ifnot? Is it a Welsh name?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. He’s a Quaker, but his parents were Puritans. He was baptised If Jesus Had Not Died For Thee, Thou Hadst Been Damned. So we call him Ifnot. Hadn’t anyone told you that?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Nobody ever tells me anything about the village. They think I won’t be here long enough to need to know. Did you see anyone else abroad other than Ben and Ifnot?’

  ‘Not this morning. There was a stranger who rode into the village last night and went to the inn.’

  The Colonel rubs his eyes. Perhaps he did not sleep well last night. It was a hot one, unless you chose to sleep out of doors.

  ‘Another stranger?’ he asks. ‘I mean, could this rider not have been the same person that you found killed?’

  ‘No, the dead man is quite short. The rider was much taller. Dressed in dark clothing. Mounted on a grey horse.’

  Surely I must recall more than that. I am beginning to wonder if Ben wasn’t right that I had drunk slightly more than I should.

  The Colonel does, however, take the most charitable view that he could.

  ‘I suppose there was no light to see him clearly?’ he says.

  I think back to the muffled voice.

  ‘No, there was a moon, but he held his cloak across his face. That was odd on a warm summer night, don’t you think?’

  If the Colonel does find this strange, he does not say so. ‘You say the man just asked for the inn?’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. There was also, as I recall, some discussion of Anabaptists, but I decide not to trouble the Colonel with this.

  ‘So, Ben must have seen him?’

  ‘Ben says not.’

  ‘Then he didn’t go to the inn,’ says the Colonel.

  ‘But he must have stopped here in the village – for a while anyway. Perhaps at some other house . . . The horse couldn’t have gone further. Might he not have been the killer? Or have seen something at least?’

  ‘Your rider went off in the direction of the inn – that is to say, the Saffron Walden road? Not along the Cambridge road, where the body was found?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘And he didn’t come from the direction of Cambridge?’

  ‘No, I’m certain he came along the London road.’

  The Colonel takes a deep breath. ‘Then he never went anywhere near where the body was found. Wherever he went, I don’t think that he need concern us. You saw nobody else abroad last night?’

  ‘Not on the road. There were plenty at the inn. Ben Bowman obviously. And Nell Bowman. Roger Pole. Dickon Grice and his brothers – Nathan and young Jacob. William Warwick. William Cobley. Ifnot was there too but says he left the inn shortly after I did.’ Then I feel obliged to add: ‘Roger Pole left before me.’ Pole is the Colonel’s secretary and the man for whom the words ‘prating coxcomb’ were specifically invented. I am sorry to have to mention him at all.

  ‘That’s right,’ says the Colonel approvingly. ‘He returned here, to the manor house, around nine o’clock, I think. Not that I could have suspected Roger of any involvement in this business.’

  Would it be tactless for me to say that I think Pole would cut anyone’s throat if he found it mildly amusing and the blood didn’t splash on his lace cuffs? But Roger Pole has an impeccable witness to say that he retired at a spinster-like hour to his own bed. That is a pity, but it cannot be helped.

  ‘And where was the village Constable?’ Colonel Payne suddenly demands. ‘By the sound of it, he was tippling while a murderer was running loose in the village. He might at least have reported the discovery of the body.’

  ‘I suspect Will Cobley is still abed,’ I say. ‘I’m sure he’ll report to you once he is up and people have told him about it.’

  ‘Asleep now and drunk when the murder occurred?’ the Colonel demands. He apparently feels that the Constable could have performed his duties better.

  ‘So it would seem,’ I say. ‘But I doubt that Cobley sober could have prevented a murder any more than Cobley drunk.’

  ‘Isn’t the suppression of drunkenness also one of his duties?’ asks the Colonel.

  The post of Constable has many cares and is, like that of watchman, entirely unpaid. It isn’t something that most people are anxious to do, especially at harvest time or sowing time or haymaking time or shearing time or when they might be doing anything more useful than poking into other villagers’ business. Those eligible for election often spend the whole year thinking of reasons why it is somebody else’s turn. Cobley has obligingly undertaken the role for a while now. Of course, it has one or two useful benefits.

  ‘Yes, he has to suppress drunkenness,’ I say. ‘That’s why Ben lets him drink free of charge.’

  ‘I shall speak to Cobley severely for failing to set a watch,’ says the Colonel. ‘I may have to fine him a pound for his negligence . . .’

  ‘I doubt if Will Cobley has ever seen twenty shillings all together in one place. He says in any case that since he was elected in 1649, his term of office was up long ago. He says he’s only doing it because nobody has appointed a successor.’

  ‘Really? Who is responsible for making the appointment?’

  ‘You,’ I say. ‘As for levying fines, we may be fined ourselves if we don’t quickly inform the neighbouring magistrates that a murder has been committed – and that a stranger passed through the village the same night.’

  The Colonel clearly does not need to be reminded of his obligations, at least not by a half-trained lawyer. ‘Cobley should be aware of his duties and the penalties.’

  I would seem to have made Will Cobley’s normally happy existence slightly more onerous. But perhaps I can still rescue him. ‘I doubt that Sir Felix would have fined him,’ I say, ‘in the days when he was magistrate here. Sir Felix was loyal to anyone who sincerely believed they were trying to serve him, however incompetently. As for any drunkenness . . . Cobley did not drink thus before the death of his son.’

  The Colonel scowls, but I can see that my arrow has struck home. When he speaks again, it is not to talk of fines, and his tone is almost placatory. ‘We may at least be sure that the killer has fled. Back to wherever he came from probably. Nobody who lives in this village would commit murder, John. You
know that and I know that, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, mentally excluding Roger Pole from this general amnesty.

  ‘And if it wasn’t one of us,’ continues the Colonel, ignoring the fact that few of the villagers think of him as anything but an upstart outsider, ‘then it must have been a stranger. Do you see my argument?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. It’s not a difficult argument to see. If it wasn’t one of us, then it was one of them. Throats don’t cut themselves.

  ‘Footpads like as not,’ says the Colonel. I wonder whether, like Ben, he will add that they must be from Suffolk, but the Colonel has not lived here long enough to have learned that honesty and decency are considered to stop short at the county boundary. The Rector referred to ‘Suffolk and Gomorrah’ in a sermon recently and nobody even thought to correct him.

  ‘So, you will send to the other magistrates? It may be that it was footpads as you say, but we should at least tell them to watch for the horseman.’

  ‘Your description of him, if I may say so, John, is hardly clear. And all we know about him is that he was asking for the inn at which the dead man was staying. What am I to say to the other magistrates? Please arrest a man on a grey horse? They’ll laugh in my face!’

  I think that my description was slightly better than that, and I doubt that the magistrates in Saffron Walden will find a killing as amusing as the Colonel suggests. Humour and murder are strange bedfellows. But that is not the point I wish to raise with him.

  ‘Was the murdered man staying at the inn?’ I ask.

  I have caused the Colonel to look bemused. ‘So I understood . . . wasn’t that what Ben told you?’

  ‘He said the murdered man had been to the inn, not that he was staying there. He said he didn’t know the man’s name.’

  For a moment the Colonel does not seem certain how to reply, then he pats me on the shoulder in a fatherly manner. ‘Very well, John. I’ll send out a description of your rider, if that is what you would like. In the meantime we’ll have the other poor fellow buried at St Peter’s. I’ll pay naturally.’

  ‘Once the inquest has taken place,’ I say. ‘The Rector won’t be happy to bury a stranger without some sort of inquiry, surely?’

  ‘Abraham Reading? Oh, he’ll not cause us any trouble,’ says the Colonel. And for the first time he actually smiles.

  Late Morning

  ‘The hair of the dog that bit you, young Master John,’ says Ben Bowman, pushing a grey, dented tankard across the counter. Having come from the Colonel’s lofty drawing room, I am aware how low the ceiling is in this smoke-blackened parlour, with its massive, gnarled beams, its great stone fireplace and the light creeping in cautiously through the tiny leaded panes of greenish glass. If I were to raise my hand, I could touch with ease the sooty timbers that support the floor above.

  But it is my purse that I reach for. I am pleasantly surprised, in view of the amount I allegedly drank last night, how full it still is. Indeed, with the shilling I acquired this morning, I would appear to have sixpence more than I left Cambridge with. Hardly a night of debauchery then.

  ‘No, put your money away,’ says Ben with previously unrecorded generosity. ‘Accept this as small apology for politely asking you to leave last night.’

  Actually, I don’t remember him being polite. Agitated possibly. Insistent definitely. But not polite. Nor did I have much support from my fellow drinkers when I raised reasonable objections. Still, I may as well let bygones be bygones.

  ‘Both apology and ale accepted,’ I say, taking a deep draught. It is cool, golden, nutty and aromatic, straight from Ben’s excellent cellar. Bowman rubs his hands together while he waits for me to say how good it is. Unlike Ifnot and Sir Felix, he did not fight in the war. Had he fought for Parliament, he says, he would have lost his Royalist customers, and had he fought for the King, he would have lost his Roundhead customers. When men shot each other at Marston Moor, Ben was brewing ale. When young Mark Cobley was breathing his last at Naseby, Ben’s plump red hands were soapily washing tankards.

  ‘As good as ever you brewed,’ I say, setting the mug down.

  Ben nods as if at a self-evident truth. ‘Been home yet?’ he asks.

  ‘I sent a message by Harry Hardy to say that I had to go and see the Colonel up at the Big House.’ I wonder if my mother threw anything breakable at Harry while he was delivering the message. Probably. I’ll check later.

  ‘So, what did the Colonel have to say?’ Ben has started to polish a tankard that is already as bright as it is ever going to be. The exertion threatens to make him breathless. He is perhaps a little too fond of his own ale and of Nell’s food.

  ‘Not much,’ I reply. Indeed, I am troubled now by how little the Colonel said. I am not sure what I had expected of him, but more perhaps than the dismissive conclusion that the killers must have been footpads and that an inquest was optional under English Law. There is no sign of the Colonel arriving to make further enquiries in the village, so I may as well ask Ben a few questions myself.

  ‘Ben,’ I say, ‘you said you didn’t know the name of the man we found.’

  Ben shrugs and starts rearranging his tankards on their shelf – misshapen pewter objects of all possible sizes, each allegedly capable of containing an honest pint.

  ‘But he was staying here at the inn, wasn’t he?’ I say to the back of Ben’s shirt. I am slightly put out that I have had to discover this for myself, when we had carried the heavy hurdle between us from the dung heap to the church. I was content to comply with Ben’s injunction that there should be a respectful silence as we carried him, but I might at least have been given that snippet of gossip as we struggled across the field.

  ‘Didn’t I say so?’

  ‘You just said that he’d been to the inn.’

  ‘Been at. Staying at. It’s all the same, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s not all the same.’

  ‘Maybe I’m just not good with words like you lawyers. You won’t hold that against a simple innkeeper, young Master John. Stop treating me like a witness in one of your courts. You’ve been studying Law too long for your own good, it would seem. Anyway, where else is a traveller supposed to stay?’

  ‘He would have had little choice,’ I say more grudgingly than I really intended. ‘But if my rider was the murderer, it would explain why he was asking for the inn.’

  Ben pivots round suddenly. ‘I keep a respectable house here. He certainly wasn’t murdered at my inn.’

  I’m not sure that’s quite what I meant, but my reassurances on this point do little to repair the damage. Ben isn’t happy to have his inn even tenuously linked to a killing, which largely explains his earlier silence on the matter. Nobody’s going to want to sleep in a room where a murder has taken place – or even where a murdered man was lately staying. Ghosts are amongst the more rational superstitions of people round here. Most of them have seen a hobgoblin clear as day. Don’t even ask them about witches.

  ‘Anyway,’ I add, ‘if our dead friend was staying here, you ought to have his name.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Ben. The good thing about Ben is that you can see from a couple of miles off when he thinks he is being cunning. I’m quite a lot closer than that.

  ‘Maybe?’ I say.

  ‘I think he said he was called Smith,’ says Ben.

  ‘Your memory’s clearly improved,’ I say.

  ‘Nell reminded me,’ says Ben. ‘I asked her when I got home. She’s the one with book-learning. She’s the one who remembers things. “Murdered man?” she says to me. “That would be our Mr Smith.” “So it was,” I says. “Mr Smith.” ’

  There is scarcely a word in this last utterance that you would trust to give you the right change of a florin. Ben has no idea that it is possible to lie and still speak in your normal voice.

  ‘Smith? Just that? No Christian name? No travel pass signed by a justice of the peace for you to demand and then tut over?’ I ask.

  ‘I wouldn’t t
rouble a gentleman for a pass. Mr Smith clearly wasn’t a vagrant or a troublemaker.’

  This is an unusually generous act on Ben’s part. His natural distrust of strangers normally contends awkwardly but on an equal footing with his chosen vocation as an innkeeper.

  ‘When he arrived,’ Ben continues, ‘he just said he was Mr Smith. From London Town.’

  ‘Then we might be able to discover his family there,’ I say. ‘In London Town. We ought to try anyway.’

  Ben’s expression tells me that London is a big place and I can try if I wish, but he’s not coming with me.

  ‘I still don’t understand, though, why the rider never came here,’ I say.

  ‘Changed his mind,’ says Ben. ‘Went to Saffron Walden.’

  ‘No. His horse was lame, and he definitely asked . . .’ What had he asked? I try to remember. He hadn’t just enquired whether there was an inn close by – he wanted this one. Normally, Ben would have no difficulty in believing that of all the inns in Essex, his would be the one that a traveller would seek out. Yet he is now trying to persuade me that somebody with a crippled horse would willingly press on into the dark night, forgoing his legendary hospitality.

  ‘Never saw him,’ says Ben.

  ‘Then maybe he went to some other house in the village . . .’ I say. Because he might have ridden on to Ifnot’s cottage and forge, or even to the Big House itself. But why, then, not ask for either one of those? He asked for the inn. How did he just vanish on that short stretch of road?

  ‘Are you sure I can’t get you some more ale, Master John? On the house of course.’

  Well, that makes two more offers of free ale than I have ever had from Ben.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘but I’d best be getting home.’

  To do this, I have to pass last night’s resting place. Harry Hardy is working in his garden in front of the cottage. He is picking beans in a leisurely way but slowly straightens his back when he sees me and nods a greeting. He’s old enough to remember my great-grandfather lived in the Big House.

  ‘How did things go with the old Colonel?’ he asks.