Bury in Haste

by Jean Rowden

  ‘If there’s any evidence of foul play you’re going a fair way to destroy it,’ Deepbriar commented, and the farmer threw down the stick and retreated a few steps.

  ‘Thought you didn’t keep horses any more.’ Minter put in.

  ‘I don’t.’ Quinn was defensive. ‘But that doesn’t mean I can afford to lose that gear. Might have needed it again some time. Or I could have sold it.’

  Patiently Deepbriar wrote down the items Quinn listed, then he walked round the site of the fire, studying the ground, sniffing at the ashes. Not that anyone would need petrol to set a hay barn ablaze. ‘Could be the fire brigade might want to come and have a look,’ he said, having satisfied himself that the frozen ground hadn’t preserved any footprints. ‘Nothing more I can do here.’

  ‘Never mind, Ferdy,’ Will Minter said cheerfully as Deepbriar finished his inspection, ‘let’s face it, that barn was pretty old, it would have fallen down in a gale one of these days, any road.’

  Quinn scowled at him. ‘Easy enough for you to say, you’re not the one getting picked on. Suppose he comes back to do the same to the rest of my buildings?’ He glared at Deepbriar. ‘Who’s to stop him?’

  ‘I’ll be talking to Bert Bunyard later today,’ Deepbriar said. ‘But unless the man can fly I can’t see any way he could have got here.’

  ‘What about Bunyard’s son?’ Quinn growled. ‘You say it wasn’t him, but where’s your proof?’

  ‘Humphrey’s too scared of the outside world to come all the way over here,’ Deepbriar assured him. ‘But I’ll check, like I said.’

  ‘I’ve not seen that boy in years,’ Will Minter said. ‘Not quite all there, is he?’

  ‘He’s harmless enough. If it wasn’t for Humphrey looking after their beasts I reckon him and Bert would have starved by now,’ Deepbriar said. ‘He might not have been overly bright at school, but he always had a way with animals, did Humphrey Bunyard. There wasn’t a dog in Minecliff wouldn’t tag along behind him when he was a boy. But I can’t see him coming over here at night, I remember his mother telling me he was terrified of the dark. That would only be three years or so back, not long before she died.’

  ‘People can change,’ Quinn said. ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to, when respectable folks can’t sleep in their beds without scoundrels opening their gates and setting their property on fire.’

  ‘I’ll be getting off home, Ferdy,’ Will Minter said. ‘Got a day’s work to do. So long, Thorny.’ He winked cheerfully behind his neighbour’s back and headed off across country towards his own farm.

  ‘Bye, Will.’ The constable sighed, resigning himself to Quinn’s grumbling all the way back; it was almost as bad as listening to Mary’s reproachful silence. They were trudging across the last field when a shrill call cut across Ferdy Quinn’s lament.

  ‘Telephone!’ Mrs Quinn’s voice, trained over the years to reach her husband as he went about his work in the fields, carried clearly. ‘For Constable Deepbriar.’

  Deepbriar increased his pace, happy to leave the farmer’s tirade behind.

  ‘It’s Ada Tapper,’ Mrs Quinn said disapprovingly, as the constable hurried up the steps into the house, ‘but she won’t tell me what it’s about.’

  Deepbriar picked up the receiver. Ada Tapper was a local character. Charlady for half a dozen households in and around Minecliff, she was to be seen almost daily walking the lanes with her huge, elephantine legs encased in thick Lyle stockings, and her big frame wrapped in an ancient army greatcoat which had probably seen service in the First World War. She carried the tools of her trade in a decrepit basket, which she protected on rainy days with a large umbrella.

  ‘This is Mrs Ada Tapper,’ she announced, delivering the words into the telephone slowly, but at maximum volume, as if she had to make them travel the three miles without benefit of wires. ‘I’m in the telephone box on the corner, by the church. I telephoned to the police house first, and they said to try at Quinn’s farm.’

  ‘This is Constable Deepbriar, Ada. There’s no need to shout. I can hear you quite well. What’s the trouble?’

  ‘It’s Mr Pattridge. I went to do for him at nine o’clock this morning, same as always on a Monday, but I can’t get in. He’s got all the doors locked. I think he’s in the parlour.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘There’s a gap in the curtains. I can see one of his legs. I’ve been knocking and calling, but he hasn’t moved.’

  ‘I’ll come and take a look,’ Deepbriar said. ‘It’ll take me about ten minutes to get there.’

  ‘I don’t think it’ll make much difference how long you take, constable. His shotgun’s on the floor beside him.’ And with that she put the receiver down.

  Deepbriar scowled at the telephone as he dialled the number for Doctor Smythe’s surgery.

  ‘I’ve got one more patient to see,’ Smythe said, once Deepbriar had explained. ‘I’ll meet you out there.’

  They arrived at Oldgate Farm simultaneously, the constable turning in just ahead of the doctor’s car. Ada stood, stolid and immobile, outside the back door. ‘There’s nothing open,’ she said, as Deepbriar tried the door handle, ‘I’ve been all round.’

  ‘I have to check for myself, Ada,’ Deepbriar said, ‘so I can write it down in my report.’

  ‘Writin’!’ Ada sniffed dismissively, with all the contempt of the unlettered. ‘Never felt the need of it.’

  The catch on the kitchen window yielded to the force of Deepbriar’s penknife, and he climbed in, then opened the door for the others. ‘Stay in the kitchen,’ he told Ada.

  She sniffed again. ‘Won’t be nothin’ I ain’t seen before.’

  When he entered the parlour and saw what awaited them there, Deepbriar doubted that. In nearly twenty years of police work he’d never seen such a scene. Often, he thought bleakly, the heroes of detective stories discovered the bodies of suicides, or more often, since they concerned works of fiction, apparent suicides. The phrase, ‘he blew his brains out’ was a familiar cliché, but he’d never imagined it being so graphically exact. A double barrelled shotgun did an efficient job. The contents of Colin Pattridge’s skull were scattered over half the room.

  ‘Found ’is dog,’ Ada said from the doorway. ‘Dead in its bed in the pantry, an’ stone cold. Bin poorly a week or two, it ’ad, reckon it was the only reason ’e went on this long, kept ’im goin’ like. Blimey,’ she said dispassionately, coming to stand at Deepbriar’s side. ‘That mess’ll take some clearin’ up.’

  ‘I told you not to come in,’ Deepbriar said.

  ‘Seen worse,’ she sniffed. ‘I was in France during the war, the first lot, ’elpin’ out in an orspital. Only a slip of a girl I was. Used to be sick sometimes at first, the fings we ’ad to deal wiv, but you got used to it in the end.’

  That probably explained the greatcoat. It was hard to imagine the solidly built Ada as a slip of a girl, but Deepbriar no longer doubted the strength of her stomach.

  ‘I’d be grateful if you’d brew a cup of tea for when the doctor’s finished, Ada,’ he suggested, ushering her away and closing the door behind her.

  ‘Not much doubt about the cause of death,’ Smythe said a few minutes later. ‘At a guess I’d say it happened some time yesterday.’

  Deepbriar had been inspecting the room. There was nothing to suggest that Pattridge hadn’t taken his own life, including his own knowledge of the man. A small collection of items lay on the table in front of the corpse; three photographs in tarnished silver frames, a letter, the ink rather faded over time, and a pocket watch. A little further away lay a single folded sheet of paper, with the word TONY written in large capitals across it.

  The spread of blood and brains had gone in the other direction; only a couple of tiny red specks had landed on the glass of the closest photograph. It showed Colin Pattridge, a good deal younger, smilingly flanked by two boys, each of them grinning at the camera and holding up a watch.

  John and Tony
. As unalike as it was possible for brothers to be. John had been the one who worked hard alongside his father on the farm, while Tony got into every kind of mischief. And John had been the one who had volunteered for the navy in 1942, as soon as he was old enough, and drowned in the Atlantic after just six months at sea, while Tony had grown to manhood a few years later and sulked his way through national service before drifting into a life of petty crime, coming home only when he was broke.

  The old letter was from one of John’s friends, evidently one of the few survivors when their ship was torpedoed. He wrote to apologise, saying how much John had wanted his father to have his watch, but that it had gone to the bottom along with its owner. There was nothing he could send back he said, except memories, and he had filled two pages with stories of the brief time he had known John Pattridge, the ink blurred in places as if he, or maybe the old man, had shed tears over the telling.

  ‘Tony hasn’t been back in a while,’ Doctor Smythe remarked, straightening from the desk at the side of the room, where he’d been writing the death certificate.

  ‘No,’ Deepbriar mused, surreptitiously wiping dampness from his eyes and replacing the letter on the table.

  ‘I hear he’s got in with a thoroughly bad lot. It would have been no wonder if his father turned him out.’

  Deepbriar nodded. He picked up the watch. This must have been the one that belonged to the younger son. And while John had treasured his, Tony evidently hadn’t cared enough to keep it with him, though he hadn’t pawned or sold it, and maybe that meant something.

  With a feeling of growing discomfort, Deepbriar flicked open the single sheet of note paper. It bore no salutation other than the bald word printed on the outside. ‘It’s all yours now,’ it said, ‘I’ve sold off the last of the stock, and sent some money to the church to make sure John’s memorial is kept in order. With everything you did, I never stopped loving you. I had your watch repaired a year ago, thinking I’d see you. I can’t bear the thought of another Christmas like the last, waiting, hoping you’d find a few minutes to visit. It wouldn’t have hurt you to go on pretending that you cared, for the sake of John’s memory, if not for me. I hope one day you’ll be happy.’ It wasn’t signed.

  Aubrey Crimmon looked nothing like his older brother; for a start he was about twice Cyril’s size. He too wore sombre clothes, but he gave the impression that this was only of necessity, because it was expected of an undertaker, or as it stated discreetly on the black briefcase he carried, a funeral director. The huge man had a cheerful air about him as he breezed into the house.

  ‘Good morning, constable,’ Crimmon extended a large black-gloved hand. ‘A sorry affair,’ he went on, ‘I take it there are no immediate relatives to consult?’

  ‘No. His surviving son hasn’t been around for a year, and as far as I can make out there’s no other family.’

  ‘How sad. Perhaps you’d be good enough to give me the few details I need, then, for the paperwork. Unless that’s the job of the plain clothes policeman I saw outside?’

  Detective Sergeant Jakes, summoned by telephone as standing orders dictated when a body was found, had arrived five minutes before Crimmon. He had taken one look at the mess inside the house and then gone straight outside to rid himself rather explosively of his breakfast.

  ‘I’ll see to it,’ Deepbriar said sombrely. He could hardly blame the younger man, he’d been grateful that some hours had passed since he’d eaten his own meal.

  It only took a minute, then Crimmon summoned his assistant who had been waiting outside, and they prepared to remove the mortal remains of Colin Pattridge from his home. Deepbriar stood by the window, half watching, though his thoughts wandered. Crimmon took hold of the sheet which Ada Tapper had brought to cover the body and began to remove it. He froze, just for an instant, his plump features tense so that for a few seconds his face looked almost gaunt. Deepbriar came abruptly out of his reverie in time to see that the man’s hands were trembling.

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Crimmon? Something wrong?’

  ‘No, nothing at all.’ The undertaker gave an unctuous half smile. ‘We see all sorts, of course, I don’t know why this should have shocked me. I beg your pardon, most unprofessional.’

  But, Deepbriar thought, it hadn’t been the sight of the shattered head that had brought the man up short. Only the dead man’s hand and arm had been uncovered in that first smooth motion. When the gun had fallen from Pattridge’s grasp, his nerveless hand had dropped to the arm of the chair. Deepbriar hadn’t noticed anything odd about it, but now, coming closer, he saw that the third and fourth fingers of the right hand were slightly webbed, making them appear shorter than the others.

  ‘Strange, that,’ he said, pointing. ‘I’ve known Mr Pattridge for years, but I’d never noticed it before. Was that what surprised you?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Crimmon nodded. ‘How very astute of you, constable. It’s just a coincidence, I believe I remember seeing a similar hand on another of our clients. I dare say it’s a common enough thing, a little abnormality like that appearing now and then. Mr Pattridge must have been related to a lot of people in this area, even if he doesn’t have any close family still living.’

  *

  Lunch, like breakfast, was a silent affair, with Mary slapping a plate of bread and cheese and pickle down in front of her husband then returning to her laundry without a word. Deepbriar stared down at the food, not seeing it. His mind was still full of the scene at Oldgate Farm. He wondered if Tony Pattridge would turn up, like the proverbial bad penny, once he heard what had happened. Would he shed a tear for his father? Folk often didn’t know what they’d got until they lost it; maybe he’d come to regret his neglect of the old man, now it was too late to do anything about it.

  Deepbriar listened to the sounds from the back of the house, identifying the moment when Mary picked up the peg bag and a basket of washing to take into the garden, letting the door slam. He had to find some way to appease her, but so far all his attempts to apologise had been rebuffed.

  Of course what he’d seen and done that morning was official police business, but he’d always been able to share a little of the burden of such things with his wife, knowing he could trust her not to gossip. He ate his meal without really tasting it, then made a pot of tea, taking a cup through to the scullery.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mary said stiffly. ‘Put it down there.’ She nodded to the shelf above the wringer.

  ‘Listen love,’ Deepbriar began awkwardly. ‘I’m really sorry …’

  ‘Not now,’ she said, elbowing him aside on her way to the door. ‘I’m busy.’

  With a heartfelt sigh Deepbriar retreated to his office. There were still a few things to do before he cycled in to Falbrough to give his weekly report, and the best remedy he could think of for a spot of melancholy was hard work.

  Deepbriar sat staring at Alfred Wriggle across the table in Emily Spraggs’s kitchen. He’d summoned the builder’s merchant with a telephone call, suffering no pangs of conscience when he exaggerated the Doctor’s concern for Joe’s state of health, insisting that Wriggle must fetch the ancient Atkinson, since Joe wouldn’t be fit to drive the lorry for another day at least.

  Wriggle was a spare man, with fine thin hair and skin stretched tight over his facial bones, as if his parsimony extended to the matter of his own flesh. He wore a threadbare jacket fastened with one remaining button, and a worn flat cap lay in front of him on the scrubbed boards.

  ‘You didn’t do that vehicle of mine any good yesterday, constable,’ he said, jerking his head towards the window. ‘Easy to see you don’t know much about motors. Reckon it’ll be needing a de-coke.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Deepbriar consulted his notebook. ‘Then while that’s being done you might like to get the headlamp fixed. Otherwise you could be getting a summons.’

  Wriggle looked innocently puzzled. ‘What headlamp’s that then?’

  ‘The one that’s been broken since midsummer,’ Deepbriar rep
lied. ‘I notice it’s not even got a bulb in it, so I’m fairly sure it won’t be working. Consider this a warning, and make sure it’s fixed by the end of the week, eh? But I didn’t come to talk about that, I need to ask you a few questions about what happened to young Joe.’

  Pursing his lips, Wriggle shook his head solemnly. ‘The pranks these youngsters get up to. Wasn’t like that in my day, we were too busy earning a crust to go messing about playing practical jokes.’

  Deepbriar studied the man’s face; if Wriggle was dissembling he could see no sign of it. ‘So you think it was a practical joke?’ he said at last.

  ‘Can’t think of any other explanation. It must have been a couple of his friends, giving him a hard time because he just got married. Not that I’d expect that sort of monkey business with Joe, he’s a quiet lad. He turns up on time and doesn’t whine if he has to work late now and then. What else could it be?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the constable said. ‘Suppose it wasn’t Joe they were after? As far as I could tell there was nothing stolen from the yard, but I’ll need you to check. You didn’t have anything special there this week? Anything particularly valuable?’

  Wriggle shook his head. ‘Had some marble slabs in for the Colonel, but Joe delivered them to the Manor last Tuesday. Though there’s a lot of stock out there, I wouldn’t want you to go thinking any different. It’d be a fair haul if somebody raided my yard, that’s for sure.’

  Having seen the state of most of that ‘stock’ Deepbriar contented himself with a noncommittal nod. ‘No sign of them removing anything. Only Joe. Somehow I don’t think this was any sort of robbery.’ The idea that thieves were responsible for Joe’s disappearance didn’t hold water. They could have waited for him to leave and had the place to themselves. Drugging a man’s tea and leaving it there, hot and inviting, was a strange thing to do. It spoke of careful planning.

  Deepbriar got an assurance from Wriggle that he’d look over his stock and let him know if anything was missing, then the old man left, driving the elderly lorry back to the yard, having rather grudgingly agreed to give Joe the entire day off without docking his pay. Once his boss had gone Joe came downstairs, his young wife flitting solicitously along behind him.