Gamekeeper's Gallows

by John Buxton Hilton

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘A bit heavy footed again last night, the Old Man, up on Benedict’s,’ Blucher said.

  ‘They were heavier feet than his again. My old hens were squawking.’

  ‘What time was this, then, Blucher?’

  ‘Well on midnight.’

  Benedict’s: Brunt had heard them say the name in here before, but it had barely registered. He opened his pocket-book and fished out the slip on which Potter had drawn the seam of ore that ran under the village. Brindley’s was marked with one of Potter’s stubby little arrows. Anyone could see that the seventeenth-century rock-tearer was not likely to get direct access to the rake from the point at which he had been driving. There were other arrows dotted about, all marking points at which Brindley could have emerged, once he had gained access to the central honeycomb. Potter had labelled some of them: Bentham’s Fathom, Piper’s Stope, Apple Swallet. But there was no Benedict’s. Brunt had to ask – in full knowledge of the danger of showing in the inn which way his curiosity was pointing. But the answer came as casually as the tone he had managed to assume.

  ‘It’s a water-gate near the top of the Clough: a drainage level for the whole system.’

  ‘Get your bloody hoof off my foot, God blast your blower-pipes.’

  Nought-Four-Nought. Thos Beresford came into The Crooked Rake very drunk, cannoning off the front door when it jammed, stopping himself from falling by stopping dead with his weight suddenly taken on one foot. Behind him, Jack Plant was looking unusually concerned, hands like a pair of engine-tender shovels, ready to steady him when he lurched again.

  ‘Where the hell’s he been, Jack?’

  ‘We stopped for lunch at the Lion, between Hurdlow and Parsley Hay.’

  ‘He’s not been driving his bloody train in that state?’

  ‘He doesn’t know who’s been bloody driving it.’

  Nadin drew them each a pint of ale without a thought for the wisdom of adding to their load. Someone made a place for Beresford at one of the tables. There was a general endeavour to make inconsequential talk.

  ‘I reckon thy rappit’s getting ready for the celebration, Thos, same as the rest of us?’

  ‘Drunk,’ Thos said. ‘Drunk as a bastard.’

  ‘Nay, Thos, th’art not drunk. Hast forgotten how much tha supped last Teapot Supper Night?’

  ‘I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about yon bloody rappit. Pissed as a coot, it was, when I got home tonight. I’d like to know where it’s getting the stuff. Of course, he’s known for a long time that Lois and Dora like to keep a drop in the house in case anyone’s taken queer. I don’t know where they bloody hide it, but I reckon yon rappit does. The night before last, I had to get up because I heard someone knocking about in the living room. And buggered if it wasn’t the old rappit. It had let itself into the house, and was rooting about in the bottom of the clock.’

  Beresford was puffing his cheeks at the end of each sentence, the effort of invention exhausting him. But he found a fresh spate of energy from somewhere.

  ‘I’ll tell you a bloody story. I’ll tell you all a bloody story. Because he …‘

  He swung round and waved a loose hand in the general direction of Brunt, his eye-brows operating furiously.

  ‘He was round my house this morning, trying to get Dora to tell him how the three of us come to be living together lawfully in wedlock. Trying to send me up on a bigamy ticket, if he can find nothing else, the bugger is. Well, it won’t bloody work, Master Brunt, because what was done was done legal. And I’ll tell you how it came about.’

  He caught his tankard with the back of his hand, sent it skidding across the table and beer swilling down over his knee. He did not even move his leg. Someone brought him a fresh pot.

  ‘I’ll tell you how it was, and then if there’s any bugger here who’s mad enough to want two missuses he’ll know how he can set about it.’

  He belched, held his mouth tightly shut and swallowed.

  ‘I’m courting the pair of them, you see: Lois, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, Dora in between times. But it’s Dora I’m after, I make no bones about that. But old Lois, you know, she has her bloody moments, too, and she’s something to be reckoned with. And damn me if those two bitches don’t find out that I’m playing off one against the other. Both of them turned up one bloody night, and I had to sit between them on the top rail of old Josh Pickford’s gate. I did my best to make out I’d gone bloody deaf.

  ‘No bloody use. The upshot of it was, if I took one, I had to take the other. Inseparable, they were, and neither of them was going to slave for a man for the rest of her days. Half a man each would be more than enough, they reckoned, the man being me. That was a fair share for any woman to take on. So I’ve got two women to feed for the rest of my days. And I’m right gone on Dora; but Dora’s as set as Lois is that they’re not going to be parted.

  ‘So it’s all bloody fixed, but on paper, at least, I tell myself, it’ll be Dora that I have. Then, if there’s ever any question, it’ll be all properly sealed and delivered. But I daren’t tell them that: I’m not putting any further ideas into their heads. I just quietly let it be Dora’s name that the banns are given out in. And there am I, sitting in the front pew, waiting for Dora to turn up in her best hat and beads, knowing that Lois was going to leap out of the porch and grab my other arm as soon as we were fairly up the aisle.

  ‘I heard the organ lash out a bit triumphant, like, and stood up and fixed my eyes on the altar, looking as angelic as I could, with my hair brushed and my eye-brows combed. Then I felt these fingers like a farrier’s mate’s fasten round my arm, and I thought to myself, Dora doesn’t come very far up my shoulder this morning. And I looked round and down, and bugger me if it isn’t Lois looking up at me, with that special smile I haven’t seen since she saw me bark my shins on Sammy Wardle’s stile.

  ‘And their vicar, you know, over at Little Haddon, he’s in his bloody dotage. Used to call me Jack Plant, half the bloody time. Do you, Dora, he says, and I do, says Lois. And she signs the register. Her writing’s as wild as a black-thorn hedge at the best of times. Bloody great L, with a loop on it that could easily be a D. An O’s an O any time of day, isn’t it? I with a dot over it that’s slipped, so it looks like the wriggle of an R. S all rounded out and flattened at the side. Lois Beresford – Dora Beresford – what’s the bloody odds? And as soon as we’re out in the porch, there’s Dora with a bunch of flowers in her hand as big as the Old Man’s kibble, bearing down on us like a Two-Four-Nought saddle-tank waiting to shunt a coke-wagon off a milk-train.’

  Beresford rolled half a pint of ale round his capacious palate.

  ‘If that didn’t wed me legally to the pair of them, I don’t know any other way of doing it. And if you can find any law broken there, Sergeant Brunt …’

  Perhaps there was even an element of truth somewhere behind the story.

  ‘Well done,’ Brunt said. ‘And now we’ll have another outstanding yarn, I think Thos.’

  ‘What yarn’s that, then?’

  Every man’s eyes were turned on Brunt now. There was something in his tone that silenced them all.

  ‘You said you’d have an answer for me in twenty-four hours, Thos. It’s two days gone already.’

  Beresford looked perplexed. ‘I promised you an answer?’

  ‘About your traps, Thos. About those traps you haven’t been attending to, up on Brindley’s Quarter.’

  The air of expectation turned into something else now. Some kind of emotional ripple affected every man in the bar. Fear played a part in it, but mostly it was the consciousness that this was a watershed.

  Beresford stood up and pressed his thighs against the edge of the table, trying to push the heavy article of furniture away from himself and thrust his way across to Brunt. He could easily have walked round the edge of the thing but physical resistance seemed to increase his determination.

  ‘You keep your hands off those sodding tr
aps, and your snout out of things that don’t concern you.’

  The table fell over and several men’s beer was spilled.

  ‘I shan’t warn you again, Brunt. You’re here for a purpose, and more strength to your arm. But my bloody traps, and what goes on on Brindley’s Quarter, has no more to do with you than my pike-rod has to do with the shed foreman.’

  Brunt had no wish to provoke him further, but there was something in his expression that apparently persuaded Beresford otherwise. A shrewd and ugly little man sat looking as peaceably as he could up into the face of a shrewd and angry big one.

  Beresford advanced across the room and pulled Brunt’s table away from in front of him, raising one hand ready to bring a row of knuckles like a limestone outcrop down over Brunt’s mouth.

  But Jack Plant was behind him: the fireman with his head as round as a football and three times the size had one hand cupped under Beresford’s elbow.

  ‘Better drop a fire-bar, Thos. She’ll blow the main valve seating else.’

  Plant looked apologetically at Brunt, as if to say that he had spent a life-time calling offside signals out to Thos. A good-natured man.

  But wasn’t Thos a good-natured man too, at bottom, when you cleared away the clutter that was mostly of his own making?

  Chapter Eighteen

  The art of doing nothing was as essential to a policeman’s skill as the ability to spot the time for sudden action. Brunt knew that he was not going to enjoy the long day before the return of Potter. Because it would be sheer madness to attempt single-handed some of the tasks awaiting his attention in Piper’s Fold. By mid-morning he had already broken the most elementary rule of all: he had been alone into Benedict’s.

  Last night’s informant had clearly been wrong in describing the place as a drainage channel for the whole system. It was set far too high in the hill-side for that to be possible. What the conduit must evidently do was to take water off from the upper workings, surplus to the capacity of the lower network, into which Brunt had already crawled with Potter. Or perhaps this had been one miner’s outlet before the Old Man had united the whole system by driving his pick into the cavern formed by the natural fault. At any rate, it was feasible that if Amy Harrington, dead or alive, had been spirited down the fissure into Brindley’s, she could have been brought out into daylight again through Benedict’s – always assuming that the fall of rock which had halted Brunt and Potter had happened after her escort had got her past the spot. A split second after, very likely, sealing off direct communication for eternity. In The Crooked Rake they would doubtless say that it was the Old Man’s doing. That was how legends came about.

  And if someone, mistaken for the Old Man, had been visiting Benedict’s on recent nights, could it be because there were traces of Amy Harrington still to be removed? Shreds of black silk torn away against the stone? Perhaps there was nothing there at all; but someone, now that Brunt had started taking an interest in underground workings, might be under an obsession to make sure of just that.

  But Brunt ought to have waited for Potter to go with him into Benedict’s.

  He knew, as always in this village, that he was being watched as he climbed up the lane that led to the mine, but no one was anxious to be engaged in conversation. Men chopping firewood, women throwing water from bowls out of their back doors, were careful not to see him. Others went into their houses and closed their doors until he had passed. He found his way up to Benedict’s and stood for a moment on the ledge outside the slit in the rock, looking out south-eastwards over the hills. From here he overlooked one flank of the Clough. He could see Pedlar’s Stump, round the base of which the foundations of a pyre had been laid. Like a colony of ants there was a little swarm, mostly of women, active round the foot of the monument. Beyond that lay the railway and the overlapping folds of the hills beyond the line. A wisp of steam trailed over the furrow of the cutting. Was that Thos at the throttle, the regulator jammed open by his tea-can? Several inclines further down lay nineteenth-century England: trains that ran on time, telegraph stations and newspapers, men at mahogany desks, bearded prison warders and hangman’s trestles. Brunt did not consider himself a major prophet, but he knew that the primeval days of Piper’s Fold were numbered.

  He lit a hurricane lamp and stepped into the jaws of the working. It rose upwards and inwards and had been cut on a much more ambitious scale than Brindley’s, the rock-sides blasted out by the primitive method of drilling sockets and leaving them packed and plugged with damped-down quick-lime. Unlike Brindley’s, there was room to walk upright, though the walls tapered sharply into the roof, so he had to be careful where he was directing his head. Otherwise his impression was much the same as in the other mine: a dank smell of clay and lime, a chill as he lost contact with the warmth outside. He was helped by the more than usually dry season they had had. But even at that, this was a wet mine, and despite the gradient, the irregular floor held long pools, some of them inches deep. Before long his feet were damp and cold from the seepage through the lace-holes in his boots.

  The going was, however, reasonably easy, and he had already covered about three times the distance that they had penetrated into Brindley’s when he came to a forking gallery. Rejecting the upper arm, on the grounds that it was less likely to communicate with the main network, he found himself slopping along a level tunnel entirely under shallow water. Except for the tantalisingly weak pool of yellow light cast by his lamp in front of him, the darkness had a quality of surreal intenseness. And suddenly his left foot, splashing its next step forwards, failed to find substance. Gingerly, supporting himself with one hand against the slimy wall, he sought around for fresh foothold. But his boot plunged down below the ankle and the icy water rose to his knee. He thrust himself backwards, twisting his whole body to support himself against roof and sides to face back the way he had come. Another step, and he would have fallen forward into a flooded shaft, and God knows how deep it might have been: perhaps only seven or eight feet, like the winze in Brindley’s – or it could be a pot-hole, half natural, half enlarged by man, that sank hundreds of feet down through the rock.

  Brunt turned back, convinced now that he was exposing himself, very possibly to no purpose, to a risk akin to insanity. But when he reached the junction with the upper gallery, he succumbed again to temptation: he would take just a little look, go just a little way; as long as he was climbing away from the entrance, he must, he told himself, be rising above the reservoir of deeper water.

  It was a stiffish climb. After the first few yards of pounded gravel, he found himself climbing a rough and largely fortuitous staircase of broken boulders. It was not a particularly dangerous ascent, though he tested the stability of each new rock before trusting his weight to it. About twenty feet up he came to a ledge – perhaps an access to the forefield, the actual working face of the rake.

  And there he found something that looked as if it might possibly have made the risks and efforts of the morning worth while: signs of human activity: a small barrel, a firkin size, known regionally as a Tommy Thumper. No relic of the Old Man, this. It was something that had been brought up here within the last few months, its woodwork still solid and its iron hoops still attacked by no more than surface rust.

  Brunt came alongside it and examined its contents – not that there was anything left but a sticky inch or two in the bottom of it: tar. And stuck into it was a short, spoke-shaved stick, of the sort that women use for stirring up clothes in their copper boilers, its end tied round with a knob of old rag like a drumstick. He examined the remainder of the ledge, determined now that this must be the limit of his venture. Twenty minutes later he was breathing the air of the village again. Even the stink of stable manure against the wall of a farm-house was welcome to him: there was something robust and honest about it.

  He went back to the inn to change his trousers and see if he could borrow a dry pair of boots. And there, to his surprise, it being barely past midday, sat Thos Beresford, drinking r
umbustiously, though not yet dangerously under the influence – it looked as if it would not be long before he was.

  Brunt did not want another confrontation. He did not ask any questions. It was the landlord, in the privacy of the kitchen, who told him what had happened.

  ‘It seems that yesterday old Thos took a drop too much along with his lunch.’

  ‘It looked rather like it, last night.’

  ‘Consequently he drove round from Hurdlow through Old Harpur with the pressure up and all his taps open.’

  ‘People are saying that the Fly was nearly on time yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Old Jack Plant, of course, had his hand ready to go for the brake, but he wasn’t quick enough to save them going through a crossing-gate that some silly sod of a farmer had left open across the line. The silly thing is that nobody would have known a thing about it. They’d have thought that somebody had backed a cart into it, or a horse had taken a dislike to it or something. There are plenty of farmers along the line who would tell a tale to save Thos Beresford’s bacon. But when the shed foreman went round this morning, before old Thos reported for duty, he found a bit of cross-paling still hanging on the front buffer. I blame Jack Plant, you know, for not going round for a look before they knocked off. But the upshot of it is that old Thos has been sacked – he’s under suspension, anyway, while it’s all being looked into. And, my way of seeing it, there are one or two other little bits of things that are going to be remembered, once those old fogeys in the boardroom start calling for a report.’

  Nadin handed Brunt a pair of boots that might more or less fit him.

  ‘Mind you, I wouldn’t go saying anything direct to Thos about it, if I were you. Don’t go trying to pull his leg about it.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of doing.’

  ‘Thos is vexed,’ the landlord said: a mighty compression of meaning into three words.

  But Thos’s vexation was, it seemed, capable of canalisation. He suddenly pushed his pot away from him and would not have it refilled.