Gamekeeper's Gallows

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘And you considered her the sort of girl from whom to expect such behaviour?’

  Kingsey pushed his chair back from his desk. ‘Sergeant, what did you say her name was?’

  ‘Amy Harrington, sir.’ Brunt answered him with pleasant patience.

  ‘I would be hard pressed, Sergeant, to put a face to the name. A girl like this – like this Amy Harrington – is engaged to light fires and keep the house clean. I do expect certain standards of personal acceptability, but my conception of these is negative rather than positive. The highest demand I make of my servants is that they should not be noticeable. I certainly do not hire them so that I can explore the labyrinthine culs-de-sac of their souls.’

  ‘They do have souls,’ Brunt murmured, almost inaudibly, and Kingsey picked it up as smartly as he might at one time have snapped at a piece of insolence on the parade ground.

  ‘What was that, Sergeant?’

  ‘I was merely considering, sir, how often these girls in domestic service do harbour their little illusions.’

  ‘You may be right, Sergeant. For my part, I do not allow it to obtrude on my life. And now it seems to me that the morning is advancing. If you would, as expeditiously as possible, arrange for my property to be brought along here, I will formally identify it.

  And if the girl is found, I will contentedly accept your advice about preferring charges.’

  But Brunt was not ready to go yet.

  ‘From what I have so far been able to put together about Amy Harrington, I would hardly expect her to have access to a professional fence – indeed, even to know of the existence of such men.’

  ‘An opportunist, Sergeant, as I have already suggested.’

  ‘The man in question was no amateur. He would certainly not buy from a thief he did not know.’

  ‘What are you insinuating?’

  ‘That she had an accomplice. She might even have sought employment here with a view to long-term mischief, though I regard this as extremely unlikely. But if she had been contacted after her arrival here – by someone in the village …’

  ‘Sergeant, the village palpably bristles with crime, but essentially of a barbaric and niggardly character. There is no sophistication in Piper’s Fold.’

  ‘And amongst your own household staff?’ Brunt continued.

  ‘Unthinkable,’ Kingsey said.

  ‘Sir, I am sure you are right. But it is something which I hope formally to establish.’

  ‘I shall establish it, Sergeant, and it will not take me long.’

  ‘If, sir, I may have your authority to question …’

  ‘You will not question any of my servants, Sergeant. And certainly you will not do so behind my back. I shall conduct such questioning as needs to be done myself.’

  He tugged the bell-cord and ordered the butler to bring a number of servants to the study.

  ‘Evans and Bootherstone, Mrs Palfreyman, Emma, Elizabeth and Swarbrick.’ At least there were some females about the house whose names he seemed to know.

  Presently a self-conscious line was standing along the edge of the study carpet, almost to attention. To the right was Edwards, glancing sideways at the straightness of the file. Beside him was Mrs Palfreyman, the housekeeper, a greying, dignified and potentially indignant woman. Next to her was a comfortable looking cook, her fresh red hands washed clean of flour, which nevertheless dusted the lower part of her arms. Then two men-servants, one in a green baize apron. Next two young girls in conventional indoor servants’dress. And finally a kitchen and boot-boy, whose collar was askew and one boot-lace dangling.

  ‘This is your entire household?’ Brunt asked.

  ‘I have gardeners; and two labourers, at present mending pot-holes in the estate road. They can be sent for if you wish; but it would take the rest of the morning to get them all here. And it would be less likely even than our present occupation to serve any useful purpose.’

  ‘I was thinking that you had another footman.’

  Brunt briefly described the character with the pomaded hair whom he had seen in The Crooked Rake; and whom the butler on that occasion had refused to recognise. It was the butler who came to the rescue.

  ‘Fletcher, sir.’

  He addressed this remark to his master, pointedly not to Brunt, and that without moving his head or eyes. Kingsey laughed; and this time decidedly unpleasantly.

  ‘There must be something radically amiss with your powers of detection, Sergeant. I do not know what Fletcher would say if he knew you had mistaken him for a footman. He is my agent, Sergeant. I have a London house, which I use only occasionally. A pied à terre, no more, and one whose pleasures I forgo with something less exhausting than fortitude. Fletcher is my steward and liaison officer. He left this morning by the Staffordshire Road and the London and North Western Railway. And now.’

  He addressed himself to the silent platoon.

  ‘Mr Brunt is a sergeant from the detective division of the County Constabulary. He wishes to put some questions to you. I may say in advance that none of you stands under any kind of suspicion. You may carry on, Sergeant.’

  He was hoping, no doubt, to draw Brunt’s sting by the sheer starch of ceremony. But Brunt behaved as if nothing could affect his state of relaxation. Ignoring the butler and the housekeeper, he moved down the line to the cook, who looked as if she might be the most amenable of the bunch.

  ‘Tell me what happened on the last night that Amy Harrington spent in this house.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can tell you, sir. She was here that night as usual. The next morning we heard that she had gone.’

  ‘At what time was that discovered?’

  ‘As I was cooking the breakfast.’

  ‘And the previous evening? She had seemed normal enough?’

  The others were breathing evenly and quietly. Brunt was struck by the quality of the clothes that some of the women were wearing: not so much by the cut of the cloth as by the material itself. He thought that the housekeeper could have passed herself off as the mistress of the house, though the sobriety of the tones she was wearing might have saved her from the suspicion that she was deliberately trying to do so. The housemaid, Emma, appeared to be wearing black silk, rather than the common hard-wearing rep of her kind, and the lace trimmings of her apron, cuffs and collars were surely too fine to stand up to her normal working day.

  Brunt looked into the cook’s face.

  ‘Come; did she seem worried at all?’

  ‘I can’t say that I knew the girl very well – not to understand her, that is. She was a child who mooned about a lot. I’d say that in her last few days she was even moodier than usual.’

  Silence from the rest of them. The other two girls, Emma and Elizabeth, were probably exercising every last effort of will-power to try to stop Brunt from catching their eyes.

  ‘You’d say that she was a dreamer, would you?’

  ‘She was often lost in her own thoughts.’

  Brunt moved back along the line and faced the housekeeper.

  ‘Would you say that she was a dreamer?’

  ‘That’s what I would call her.’

  ‘And what sort of thing was she dreaming about, Mrs Palfreyman?’

  ‘I am not a mind-reader, Sergeant.’

  Brunt moved down to the younger girls, his idle gait deliberately out of keeping with the military charade.

  ‘Did she ever tell either of you two what she was dreaming about?’

  Emma did not speak; but her companion blurted something out.

  ‘She was a bit simple, sir.’

  ‘How, simple?’

  ‘Sir, I don’t mean that she was soft in the head, sir. She was – well, sir – she did not always know how to go on in a big house. She didn’t like being here.’

  ‘Because you teased her?’

  ‘We used to, a bit, sir, but we meant no harm.’

  Then the boot-boy interrupted. ‘Sir, when she wasn’t on duty, she used to go across a lot to Brindley’s Quar
ter.’

  ‘Brindley’s Quarter?’

  ‘She mooned about there, sir. She’d be there on her own for an hour or two at a time.’

  ‘And what and where is Brindley’s Quarter?’

  Which gave Kingsey his opportunity to take fresh command of the dialogue. ‘Obviously, Sergeant, you are not well acquainted with the vocabulary of the lead-mining fraternity.’

  ‘I am more at home with the terminology of the coalface.’

  ‘Yes; you look as if you might be.’

  Whereupon the butler actually chuckled.

  ‘Sergeant, I do believe you actually think that a crooked rake is a broken agricultural tool.’

  The housekeeper was now smiling broadly.

  ‘I was well aware, sir, that a rake is the main seam of ore in a locality.’

  ‘Brindley was a seventeenth-century optimist who tried to drill into the rake at a point where it had already petered out. A Quarter Cord, Sergeant, is the name given to the space which a stake-holder was allowed round the entrance to his adit, to deposit his waste, to erect a shed for his tools and to accommodate his buddle. That is a stone trough used for washing ore.’

  ‘I am obliged to you for the information, sir.’

  Was Kingsey merely trying to deter him from questioning the boy?

  ‘But I was unaware that our late-lamented Amy – what was her other name?’

  ‘Harrington, sir.’

  ‘That Amy Harrington had formed the habit of communing at Brindley’s Quarter. I am beginning to remember the girl now – now that she has been called a dreamer. She was certainly that. One morning I discovered in the nick of time that she had laid the breakfast-room fire with, among other things, one of my newest Grecian slippers.’

  Laughter now the length of the line. Kingsey drew continued cheerfulness from it.

  ‘Brindley’s Quarter. Obviously, the Quarter accorded to one Brindley. Well, I fear that Amy Harrington would find little there in the way of an oracle to interpret her dreams for her. Unless, of course, she knew how to call on the Old Man. Does he mean anything to you, Sergeant?’

  ‘The Old Man?’

  ‘A composite Derbyshire ghost: the embodiment of all the men who have ever tried to tear a living from the rock. Not an individual; not even a phantom Brindley. He is the whole lot of them, lumped together: the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane – all the Peakrel lead-miners that ever there were. They believe in him very firmly in the village, quite like him, actually. He is said not to be malevolent. Not in the least. Unless you are up to something in one of his old workings that you shouldn‘t be.’

  Kingsey suddenly swung round and barked at the servants.

  ‘Parade dismissed! You have your work to do, and I can’t have any more of your time wasted like this. It must be sadly obvious to Sergeant Brunt by now that none of us is able to help him.’

  Brunt let it happen. There would be other ways of following such leads as he had picked up here, and in Kingsey’s presence he was going to pick up no more. But even an attempt to side-track him was informative. Kingsey himself escorted him down to the entrance-hall.

  ‘So. One presumes that a team of stallions would not keep the diligent sleuth away from Brindley’s Quarter?’

  ‘I’d certainly like to cast my eye over the spot.’

  ‘You are welcome to wander anywhere you want about the estate. I wonder why Brindley’s Quarter attracted this evidently introspective lass. Always on the look-out for a cache, do you think? Beyond the kitchen-yard you’ll see the stables and beyond them a hillside that looks like the discarded butt-end of Creation. The litter is Brindley’s.’

  He actually, over-playing the image of geniality, put out a hand for Brunt to grip.

  ‘Mind the Old Man doesn’t get you, Sergeant.’

  Chapter Seven

  Brunt was content to go where Kingsey wanted him to. It was enough for the moment to know that Kingsey wanted to be able to account for his movements. He crossed the kitchen-yard and went round the back of the stables. Brindley’s Quarter was not difficult to find – Brindley had certainly made an enduring mess of the hill-side. Even before the advent of Brindley, the prospect must have been frighteningly sterile, a reminder to passing man of his tenuous grip upon his planet. As Kingsey had said – the butt-end of Creation.

  But Brindley had evidently not been a man to give in easily. It was doubtful whether he had ever got more out of his rake-end than enough to fill his Dish – the standard measure fixed by the Barmote Court to establish a miner’s right. Brunt knew more about the ancient practices than he had cared to reveal to Kingsey. He found now a good deal of evidence of Brindley’s activities: the foundations and an end-wall of Brindley’s coe: his rough stone storeshed. The rotten framework of an old wooden sledge, used for dragging waste out of the working: Brindley’s corfe. The rusted iron hoop from an old bucket: Brindley’s kibble. Brunt scrambled up the tip-heap – Brindley’s deads – and found himself in sight of the oblong slit in the rock face that had been Brindley’s barren mine.

  Brindley had obviously followed down a narrow fissure and driven his first boring along the line of a natural fault that made easier work for his pick. The gashes could still be seen where the pick head had slipped against the stone: scars a couple of centuries old. Brunt lowered his shoulders, the rock ceiling was nowhere more than five feet high, and walked some way into the working. His boots slopped through a stagnant puddle, the walls lined with a dank lichen. Then the floor became drier, though there was a stench from the droppings of the generations of bats that had housed there since Brindley’s day. Daylight receded behind him, was blocked out by the breadth of his own shoulders. Brunt struck a match; it was immediately extinguished by a draught. He struck another and cupped it in his hand. It shone unnaturally yellow. Somewhere ahead of him water dripped in two separate places, an unpredictable cross-rhythm that could easily fray the nerves of a lonely man. Somewhere in a distant gallery a pebble fell: the Old Man? Still walking his galleries in search of an outcrop of the rake? There was small wonder that imaginations were active locally. Brunt turned and began to shuffle back towards the daylight. Outside, as he came up out of the fissure, the air was unbelievably warm and clean.

  So why had Amy Harrington taken to coming here? Just to escape from the mockery of the servants’table? Didn’t they breed them any tougher than that in Tapton these days? Hadn’t a year in old Eleanor Copley’s chimney-corner hardened her off? Didn’t know how to go on in a big house? She had been three years at Rowsley. The Alloways were mill-owners, they ran an establishment of substance.

  Was she stealing from Kingsey, and using the mine as a cache? Or had someone else got a cache there – someone from the Hall who was hoodwinking Kingsey? Had Amy Harrington been stupid enough to get herself mixed up in something? Had she merely suspected some mal-practice? Had she conceived some romantic notion, culled from her silly reading, of herself helping to bring the thief to book?

  Brunt sauntered along the flattened summit of Brindley’s deads. A narrow footpath skirted a weathered concavity in the rock-face and he found himself on a level grassy patch from which he could overlook the Hall. Someone had harnessed a governess’cart and he saw it set out along the estate road that was Kingsey’s private link with the Staffordshire side.

  There was a rabbit-warren up here. A part-grown animal was cleaning its whiskers heedless of Brunt’s presence. Brunt began to search the terrain systematically, presently came upon a rabbit trap, one of a pattern with which he had become familiar on the hills between Matlock and the coal-field. A wooden peg some nine inches long was driven firmly into the ground, holding one end of a wire noose that was also joined to one arm of a powerful lateral spring. When an animal was up to its shoulders in the noose, the spring was released. Its upper arm shot up to the perpendicular, so that the rabbit was snatched off its feet and hung with its neck broken, its front paws hanging pathetically down, like those of a begging poodle.

  What was
curious was that there was actually a rabbit in this trap – a rabbit that had been in it for a very long time. Its fur had been soaked by dews and storms and dried in the Pennine winds – time and again. Its eye-sockets were empty and the head twisted and misshapen. A little way away he found a second trap. This one had caught a cat, a creature that had died with its upper lip curled savagely away from its teeth.

  A third trap had caught a hen, a stray from someone’s yard. To judge by the litter of feathers, the fowl had not given in easily. But a fox had partially liberated it, and Brunt found the feather-fan of a wing some distance away.

  The bodies were all some months old. A few months ago some poacher had set his traps here for the last time. He could not have known then that he would not be coming back. He would not likely abandon his traps and catch.

  Thos Beresford? Not unnaturally, the thought crossed Brunt’s mind, and he dismissed it as a dangerously misleading impulse. There must be other poachers in Piper’s Fold. Someone who had been warned off this particular warren? But wouldn’t Thos and his friends have seen that as an irresistible challenge? And would not any gamekeeper sending them off have confiscated their gear?

  It all pointed, Brunt felt sure, to the fact that someone had felt under a compulsion, for the last few months, to stay away from here. He continued to stave off his first wishful guess: there was no logic in jumping at Thos Beresford.

  But then an intuitive certainty struck Brunt: Thos would know about it.

  Chapter Eight

  Brunt sat in the late afternoon in the musty, brown-walled inhospitality of his bedroom in the inn. Since his comparatively leisurely return from the lead working, nothing had happened. Piper’s Fold was about its business, whatever that might be. A man mending a wall had been eager to touch his cap to him, and they had talked for a minute or two; about crows, for some reason.