JM01 - River of Darkness

by Rennie Airth

  “What do you have to do, anyway?” Jimmy demanded. “And why tomorrow afternoon?”

  Biggs took out the letter Mr. Wolverton had given him and squinted through his horn-rimmed spectacles at the nearly illegible handwriting, which meandered drunkenly across the page. “All she says is she needs someone to do something for her and it has to be tomorrow afternoon. She’s underlined ‘afternoon’ several times. She says it’s important. She’s underlined that, too.” Biggs sipped his beer.

  “And she lives at bloody Knowlton?” Jimmy scowled. “What’s her name?”

  Biggs glanced at the letter again. “Troy,” he said. “Winifred Troy.”

  The early-afternoon bus left for Knowlton at a quarter to two, and Biggs reached the bus station with five minutes to spare, having spent the morning working at the office. He just had time to dash back to his lodgings and exchange his dark suit and black bowler for plus-fours and a checked cap. A pair of two-tone shoes, which he’d recently bought at a reduced price through the good offices of Jimmy Pullman, completed his ensemble. He was ready for a trip to the country.

  The journey to Knowlton took forty minutes. The bus service, linking Folkestone and Dover via a string of inland villages, was a post-war innovation, and it looked like the business was flourishing. Every seat in the green-painted vehicle was taken and Harold was obliged to share his own with a dough-faced woman in the late stages of pregnancy.

  To pass the time—and to take his mind off the disagreeable thought that the short, panting breaths he heard coming from beside him might herald an impromptu birth—he began to conduct a mental exercise. He had recently completed a correspondence course in Pelmanism, a method of memory training designed to eliminate mind-wandering and increase concentration. The course, a popular one in Biggs’s set, had been heavily promoted. “How to Eliminate Brain Fag!” the advertizements trumpeted. Harold was convinced that his memory was sharper as a result and he set out now to recall as much as he could of what he had read in the previous day’s newspaper.

  The main story on the front page had dealt with the Irish peace talks, which had dragged on in London all summer. A formal conference of the parties was due to open shortly, but diehard elements in Sinn Fein were opposed to any agreement that excluded the province of Ulster from a United Ireland. The report recalled that a shipment of 500 sub-machine-guns destined for Sinn Fein had been seized recently in New York.

  There had been further debate in the House of Commons on the government’s decision to admit women to the civil service in three years’ time. Despite recent rains most of southern England was still in the grip of drought and rigid economies would be necessary for the remainder of the year. The price of whisky had been increased again. A bottle now cost 12/6d.

  Most of these stories he had only glanced at (though he seemed to have retained the salient facts!). But there was one item he had read with close attention, a lengthy article dealing with the police investigation into the murders at Melling Lodge in Surrey two months earlier.

  Biggs had followed the case with interest from the start. It was a talking point in his office and in the Bunch of Grapes where he usually spent his lunch-hour. The apparently reasonless crime had caught people’s imaginations. Some thought it the work of a maniac—Jimmy Pullman held to this view—but Harold felt there was more behind the murders than met the eye. “It’ll turn out to be the person you least expect,” he had predicted. “Someone like the post-man.”

  He’d been disappointed initially when the opening words of the article—“Important developments are expected soon in the continuing investigation into the horrific murders at Melling Lodge”—were not borne out in succeeding paragraphs. Instead, the report detailed the progress of the inquiry to date. Or lack of progress, since it was plain the police had made little headway. The writer questioned whether the investigation was on the right track. If, indeed, it ever had been.

  The shock felt at the killings seemed to have induced a sense of “panic,” he asserted. “Wild theories” had abounded at the outset and even now, when it was increasingly clear that what they were dealing with was “an isolated incident of senseless violence,” there seemed to be an unwillingness, even among experienced officers, to approach the matter in “a straightforward way.”

  Harold was gratified to discover that he was able to retrieve key words and phrases from the text.

  A move to seek the help of “outside experts” had been checked, thanks to prompt action at the “highest levels” in the Yard. But the investigation had continued to flounder in the eyes of many, who questioned whether proper attention had been given to “the most basic areas of crime detection.”

  A description of the man sought had been available to the police for some time, but there was doubt whether this area of the inquiry had been pursued with “sufficient thoroughness.” Another “solid lead” was the motorcycle and sidecar that the murderer was known to have used. It was rare in police work for a physical clue of this nature to yield no results, the reporter declared, leaving unspoken the implication that the detectives in charge of the case had somehow failed to make the most of it.

  Somewhere in England is a man answering to the description who owns a motor-cycle. Surely it only requires a methodical approach by the police of this land acting in concert to uncover his identity.

  This somewhat dramatic assertion had lodged intact in Harold’s newly improved memory. But he was puzzled by the article as a whole. He couldn’t determine whether the reporter was giving his own opinions or those of the “informed circles at Scotland Yard” to whom he referred from time to time. And it was only right at the very end of the report that the “important developments” heralded in the opening paragraph were finally revealed: The lack of progress has pointed to the need for a fresh approach. It is understood that the officer at present heading the inquiry, Chief Inspector Sinclair, will shortly be replaced by the man thought best qualified to bring matters to a successful conclusion, Britain’s most famous detective, Chief Superintendant Albert Sampson, better known to the public as “Sampson of the Yard.”

  Knowlton was not Biggs’s final destination. Mrs. Troy lived at a place called Rudd’s Cross, which he had been told was in the vicinity. Inquiring at the village pub, where the bus deposited him, he learned that in fact it was more than two miles away and could only be reached by a footpath that ran through the fields.

  As he left the outskirts of Knowlton a distant rumble came to his ears. Away to the west the thunderheads of a storm were massing. The air was warm and muggy. Harold took off his glasses and mopped his face with a handkerchief. He’d brought no umbrella with him.

  He hurried on through the stubbled fields, keeping an anxious eye on the heavens. Pausing at a stile, he removed his cap and patted dry the two bays of bare scalp on either side of his widow’s peak. Thunder boomed again, louder this time. His new shoes were starting to pinch.

  The bubble of resentment which had been swelling inside him all morning burst into angry recognition that he had let himself be used. Exploited! He might have minded less if there’d been any mention of compensation when Mr. Wolverton gave him his assignment.

  His bitterness grew as it fastened on this grievance. Only last month his request for an increase in salary had been turned down. He’d felt hard done by then. After years of wartime privation the shops were at last full of goods worth buying. Harold himself had been saving for months to purchase a wireless set—public transmissions by the new British Broadcasting Company were due to start the following year. Further off in his future the mirage of a motor-car shimmered.

  Jimmy was right, he thought angrily, as he set off again. It was time he asserted himself.

  Biggs was at his wit’s end. He could make no sense of the old woman’s ramblings. She would start on one thing, skip to another, and then lose the thread of both.

  “Edna Babb? She’s the girl who ‘does’ for you? Have I got that right, Mrs. Troy?”

  Finding
his way to the cottage had proved no problem. It was just as Mr. Wolverton had described it, standing on its own, separated by an apple orchard and unploughed fields from the rest of the houses grouped around the crossroads that gave the hamlet its name. But it had taken repeated hammerings on the door with the brass knocker before he heard the shuffle of slow footsteps inside and saw the door handle turn.

  “Mr. Wolverton?”

  The figure peering up at him from the shadowy hallway was old and bent. Her thinning white hair was drawn back in an untidy bun. She wore a thick, knitted shawl wrapped about her shoulders over a long, stained skirt of dark bombazine. Wondering how she could possibly mistake him for his employer, he had given her his name. It was only when he went inside—when she led him into the small parlour and seated herself in a high-backed chair beside the window where a bar of sunlight entering through lace-net curtains illuminated her face—that he noticed the milky, cataract-clouded eyes.

  He had pulled up a chair beside hers, and now he sat and listened while she talked of people he had never heard of—of “Edna” and “Tom Donkin” and “Mr. Grail”—as though they were old acquaintances of his. While she spoke her hands moved ceaselessly, fondling a cat that had jumped into her lap as soon as she sat down, a large tortoiseshell beast which regarded Biggs steadily through narrow slitted eyelids. Its rasping purr filled the gaps of silence left by the quavering, breathless voice. Listening with half an ear, Harold thought sourly of the likely drenching he was in for later as the thunder rumbled ever closer. The shaft of light filtering through the lace-net curtains had dulled to a leaden beam.

  “Tom Donkin took care of the garden?”

  The picture was becoming clearer. Donkin was a local man, someone the Babb woman had found to work as a gardener and handyman. It seemed there was something between them, a relationship, but they had fallen out—had a fight in Mrs. Troy’s words—and Donkin had gone away. He was no longer living in the district and Edna Babb had been trying to discover his whereabouts.

  “Looking all over,” Mrs. Troy explained. She turned her face towards Harold, milky blue eyes blinking like some blind underground animal’s. “Poor girl. I think she’s expecting.”

  This had happened some months ago and since then Edna Babb had ceased to be someone Winifred Troy could count on. She still came in to clean, but only intermittently. Once a week, instead of the three times agreed on. Sometimes not at all.

  “Why didn’t you find someone else?” Biggs asked, increasingly impatient.

  It seemed there was no one else, not in Rudd’s Cross. Edna “did” for two other families and they, too, complained of being let down. Sometimes she disappeared for days.

  Unmoved by the old woman’s predicament, Biggs was just telling himself he could see no way of dealing with the matter—not if the wretched Babb was the only cleaner available—when he discovered to his amazement that this, after all, wasn’t the problem. It was merely the background to it. Mrs. Troy had learned to cope with Edna’s absences. If the house wasn’t properly cleaned—and there was plenty of evidence of this in the layer of dust he could see coating the mantelpiece in front of him and dulling the glass front of the silver cabinet across the room—it didn’t seem to bother the old woman. The crisis lay in another quarter. To be precise, in the shape of Mr. Grail.

  Mr. Grail?

  Harold had forgotten about him. Now he had to sit and listen again as Mrs. Troy explained in her halting, back-and-forth way that he was the man who had looked after the garden since Tom Donkin’s departure.

  But there was more to it than that.

  One of Edna Babb’s duties had been to shop for her employer in Knowlton, but since she could no longer be relied on Mrs. Troy had been forced to seek an alternative source of supplies.

  “I told Mr. Grail he could use the garden shed—that’s what he wanted—but he had to bring me food when he came.”

  Why? Biggs wondered. Why on earth not ask one of the village women to shop for her? What was she clinging to so desperately? Was it her independence? She shouldn’t be living here on her own, he thought irritably. Didn’t she have someone to care for her?

  “What can I do for you, Mrs. Troy?”

  “I want you to tell him to go.” She spoke for the first time with certainty. “I don’t want him coming back.”

  Biggs blinked. “You’ve spoken to him, have you? Is he giving trouble?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t talk to him,” she said. “I want you to tell him.”

  Now that he understood at last, Harold didn’t trust himself to speak. He’d been dragged all the way out here on his afternoon off just to give some fellow his marching orders! As though to underline his sense of outrage, a loud crack of thunder sounded overhead. It was followed by a patter of raindrops on the roof that swiftly became a downpour. My God, he was going to get drenched!

  He sought to keep a grip on his temper. “Where can I find him?” he asked abruptly.

  “He usually comes on a Saturday.” She turned her nearsightless eyes on him again. “Saturday afternoons. That’s why I wanted someone here today.”

  Without a word Biggs stood up and went out into the narrow hallway. He found what he was looking for—an umbrella, it was standing in a flowered china vase—and went from there directly through the house to the kitchen at the back. The smell of stale food assailed his nostrils. A pile of unwashed plates and dishes lay on the draining-board of the sink. Through the window he could see the shed, at the bottom, and to one side, of a small square of lawn bordered by flower-beds.

  He flung open the kitchen door. The rain fell like a curtain before his eyes. Fuming, he stepped outside, opening the umbrella as he did so, and splashed across the already-sodden patch of grass to the shed. The door was barred by a heavy padlock. He hammered on it.

  “Grail!” he called out. “Grail! Are you there?”

  There was no response. He laid his ear to the wooden door, but he could hear nothing above the noise of the rain beating on the corrugated iron above his head and pouring in a stream from the edge of the roof on to his spread umbrella.

  He knocked once more, again without result, and then plodded back to the house. As he stepped into the kitchen he saw that the white leather of his new white-and-tan shoes had turned a muddy brown. Furious, he dried them with a kitchen towel. He returned to the front room.

  “Grail’s not in the shed, Mrs. Troy. I doubt he’ll come in this storm. Where does he live, anyway?”

  She didn’t know. Grail had never said. In short order Harold discovered there was almost nothing she did know about the man. He’d appeared mysteriously, several months back, in early spring. He came often on a Saturday but not every week. He usually brought food for her, groceries of some kind, though not always what she asked for.

  “Just any stuff,” the old woman said, with sudden, fierce resentment.

  So that was it! Grail hadn’t lived up to his end of their bargain. Calmer in his mind now, Biggs reflected coolly. As far as he could see, the garden appeared to have been cared for. If it was just a question of the food Grail was bringing, then a word in his ear might do the trick.

  Seating himself beside her again he began to put it to her, suggesting that if someone took Grail aside and—

  “No! No! No! That’s not what I want.” Twin pink roses like fever spots blossomed in the pallor of her cheeks. The hysteria in her voice shook him. “I don’t want to have to deal with that man. Please! Listen to me!”

  Flushing, Biggs sat back. There was no reasoning with her, he told himself bitterly. She was old and stubborn, and probably feeble-minded. She ought to be in a home. He couldn’t see what this fellow Grail had done that was so terribly wrong. Anyone would think he was Satan incarnate! For a moment he wondered if there was something here he hadn’t understood. Something she’d left unsaid. But he pushed the thought from his mind. All he wanted was to get the damned business settled and be on his way.

  “Well, I can’t tell h
im anything if he’s not here,” he said sharply. “And I can’t wait forever.”

  She sat still in her chair, her face turned away from his. The cat’s purring had ceased. “I want Mr. Wolverton to come,” she said in a low voice. “I’ll speak to him.”

  The implied threat in her words brought the blood rushing to his cheeks again. “There is something I can do,” he said quickly. “I could write him a letter. Mr. Grail. I’ll leave it in the shed, so if he comes tomorrow he’ll find it. I’ll tell him he has to go, to quit the premises. There—will that help?”

  She said nothing. But her shoulders under the knitted shawl made a faint shrugging gesture.

  He stood up, temples throbbing. Old and helpless as she was she’d managed to humiliate him. He felt as though she had slipped a chain around his neck and given it a sharp jerk. He moved away to a small writing desk that stood against the wall behind her chair and sat down. His hand shook as he unscrewed his fountain pen and took a sheet of paper from one of the pigeon-holes.

  Dear Mr. Grail

  Mrs. Troy informs me that for some time now she has allowed you the use of her garden shed in return for certain services . . .

  The room grew suddenly brighter as he wrote. Glancing up he saw that a beam of sunlight had broken through the lace-net curtains. He was aware that the rain had stopped a few minutes before. The sunshine brought a flash of silver from the glass-fronted cabinet, and Harold’s eye was drawn that way. He noticed a pair of tankards standing on a silver salver that occupied the top shelf of the cabinet. The sight of them awoke a recent memory in him. He had gone to an auction in Folkestone with Mr. Wolverton to oversee the sale of a deceased client’s effects. He recalled the auctioneer holding up a brace of silver mugs, very like the ones in the cabinet.

  “Georgian,” the auctioneer had said. They had fetched £120, the pair of them.

  She now finds it necessary to put an end to this arrangement and I am writing to inform you of this. Since no contract exists between you and Mrs. Troy I assume that a period of notice of one week from today will be sufficient . . .