The Nightingale

by K. J. Frost

  “You’re welcome,” she mumbles, half asleep already.

  “What have you got planned for today?” I ask Amelie over breakfast.

  She was clearly feeling a little more refreshed after a good night’s sleep and woke me over an hour ago, rather beautifully, I have to say. And now, she’s seated on my lap, having evidently decided this really is the way to eat breakfast, and made the suggestion herself when she brought in the teapot and placed it on the table. And I was never likely to decline, was I?

  “First thing’s first, I’ll make the bed,” she replies, twisting on my lap and looking up at me, smiling, “being as the sheets are all over the place after this morning.”

  “Well you did get rather carried away,” I tease.

  “You helped,” she murmurs.

  “Just a little bit.”

  She smiles. “And then I’ll tidy up down here. But after that I’m not sure what I’ll do. I’ve got the cottage pie to make, but that’s hardly going to take all day, is it?”

  She sounds rather melancholy now and I tighten my grip on her. “You’ll be all right, won’t you?” I ask.

  “I’ll be fine, Rufus.” She leans back, attempting a smile. “I’m sure I’ll find plenty to do once you’ve gone.”

  “Well, just don’t over-do it, will you? You’re still tired…”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t want to come home from work and find you’ve exhausted yourself.”

  “Why? Do you have something planned?” she asks, with a teasing note in her voice now.

  “Yes.” I reach around, clasping her chin and turning her face to mine, so I can kiss her. “Once you’ve fed me cottage pie, I want to take you to bed.”

  “Again?”

  “Yes… again. I told you last night, I can’t get enough of you.”

  She smiles. “The feeling is entirely mutual.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. But for now, it looks like a kiss is going to have to suffice to get me through the day.” I lower my lips to hers and put my words into actions.

  Doctor Wyatt is waiting in my office, together with Thompson, the two of them sitting on the chairs in front of my desk and talking quietly until my arrival, at which point they stop and turn, looking at me expectantly.

  “What?” I say, taking off my hat and coat and hanging them on the hook behind the door.

  “Nothing,” Wyatt says, smiling.

  “What is it?”

  “The doctor here was just remarking on the fact that your timekeeping isn’t what it used to be,” Thompson says, pursing his lips and trying not to smirk.

  “I’m not late.” I check my watch just to be sure. It’s eight forty-five, which I suppose is a little later than usual, but nothing to write home about.

  Thompson raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t say anything.

  “I’ve been here for half an hour.” Wyatt’s voice is mirthful.

  “As have I,” Thompson adds. “Actually, I’ve been here since eight.”

  “And? Are you both looking for a commendation, or something?”

  “No, but normally, I’d have expected to find you behind your desk,” Wyatt says.

  “Well, that was before I realised there’s more to life than work,” I point out, sitting down at my desk and facing them.

  “You mean, that was before you got married,” Wyatt replies, nodding to the photograph of Amelie on my desk, which reminds me that I’ll need to replace it with one of our wedding photographs, once they’re developed. “You’re a lucky man.”

  “I know I am.” I smile across at the two of them. “Now, enough of this. What have you got for us?”

  Wyatt’s expression changes from one of good cheer, to one of misery. “I don’t like your cases, Stone,” he says, more sourly. “They always have something ‘off’ about them.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “In this instance,” he says, opening the pale brown file that he’s carrying, but continuing to look at me, “I can tell you that Mildred Ryder was stabbed twice with a long thin bladed knife – possibly a carving knife, or a kitchen knife… something like that, anyway.”

  “I hadn’t realised there were two wounds,” I remark, sitting forward and resting my hands on the desk.

  “Yes.” Wyatt puts down his file, and stands, demonstrating on himself that the first wound, the visible one, was high up on the girl’s stomach, while the second one was hidden beneath her clenched hands, much lower down on her abdomen. “At the time,” he adds, sitting again and reclaiming his file, “it looked as though she’d perhaps touched the upper wound, getting blood on her hands, but had then moved her hands lower down, when in reality, she was hiding the other puncture site.”

  “Does that mean she’d have died instantly?” I ask, even though I know it’s highly unlikely.

  “No.” He shakes his head forlornly. “As I told you at the time, she’d have bled to death over a period of probably at least half an hour, but maybe longer.”

  “And she was definitely killed at the scene?”

  “Yes. That much was obvious, just based on the amount of blood there was beneath the body.”

  I nod my head. “Do you have anything further to add regarding the timings?” I ask.

  He pauses, seemingly reticent. “It’s hard to be precise, Stone,” he says eventually, looking down at his file. “I can’t tell you exactly when the wound was inflicted, which I know is what you’re really after. I’ll need to do further tests as to the time of death even, but if you want me to hazard a guess, I’d say you’re looking at somewhere between seven pm and midnight.”

  “A five hour window?” I remark, frowning.

  “Yes. I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do at this stage. The temperature on Friday night was freezing, or just below and it doesn’t help matters.”

  “Is there anything else?” I ask, wondering if my theory about the diary is correct.

  Wyatt closes the file and puts it back on the table again. “Do you mean something like the fact that Mildred Ryder was approximately three months pregnant at the time of her death?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean,” I reply and he stares at me.

  “How did you know?” he asks.

  I reach out to the side of my desk and pick up the diary for 1939, thumbing through to November and showing Wyatt the cross beside the sixth of the month. “Miss Ryder used this system to mark the beginning of her menstrual cycle,” I tell him. “But, although she’d used the same routine for the previous five years or so, there are no such marks anywhere in December or January.”

  He smiles. “Anyone would think you were a detective,” he says.

  “They might. But in this instance, I can’t claim the credit. My wife helped me to work this one out,” I explain, and then smile, for the simple reason that I just said the words ‘my wife’, and I can’t help smiling whenever I do that.

  Wyatt shakes his head and then says his goodbyes, having nothing further to impart. He leaves us with his file and tells me that he’ll do his best to get a more precise time for the stabbing, although he can’t make any promises.

  Once he’s gone, Thompson turns to me, still smiling. “I’m sure you’re not going to give me a reason for your late arrival, but I do have another message for you.”

  “Oh yes?” I ignore the first part of his statement and look at him, my eyebrows raised.

  “Edgar Prentice came by earlier, looking for you. He said to tell you that he went over to the churchyard on Saturday afternoon, as requested, but that there’s nothing doing with the footprints.”

  I sit back, sighing. “I didn’t think there would be. There had been far too much traffic over the site, and the rain probably hadn’t helped.”

  “Oddly enough that was exactly what he said… almost word for word. It’s easy to tell that you two worked together at Scotland Yard for years.”

  He’s not wrong. Edgar Prentice I worked at the Yard for a long time, before I moved back to
Molesey to be with Amelie, and he followed suit; not out of any loyalty to me, but because he was looking for a quieter life, away from the hustle and bustle of London.

  “He knows me too well,” I remark. “Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Not that I think it matters… not in this case. Not as far as the footprints are concerned, anyway.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. I think we’re going to find the solution to this one is within the personalities of the people involved, and their circumstances. I don’t think hard evidence is going to have much to do with it.”

  “That should make it really easy to prove then, shouldn’t it?” Thompson replies, letting out a deep sigh.

  As I said to Amelie last night, I honestly don’t believe that Sam Higgs is guilty of Mildred’s murder, but now we know for sure that she was pregnant before her death, he has to be our first port of call, and Thompson drives us over to his parents’ house, once we’ve had a cup of tea and gone through Mildred’s diaries again, just in case there’s anything we might have missed. We did get rather waylaid by discovering her pregnancy, after all.

  “I suppose there’s a chance he might be out,” Thompson muses as we walk through the garden gate and up to the front door of the neat terraced house, which he knocks upon loudly.

  “There is, but we have to try,” I reply, just as the door opens and we gaze upon the young man himself. His eyes are red-rimmed, as though he’s spent the last twenty-four hours crying, which I suppose isn’t that surprising, and I wonder how he’s going to react to our latest piece of information.

  “Inspector,” he says, his voice more monotone than I remember it.

  “Mr Higgs. May we come inside?”

  He steps aside, without responding, and we pass through, removing our hats as we do so, and going into the living room.

  “Are your parents here?” I ask him.

  “No.” He shakes his head at the same time. “Dad’s at work still…”

  “Still?” I query, given the time of day.

  “Yes, he’s a postman.” I nod my head and he continues, “And Mum’s gone to the shops.” He frowns slightly. “Did you want to see them?”

  “No. I wanted to see you.” I had hoped that one of them would be here though, because I think the young man in front of us might find today’s conversation even harder than yesterday’s – if that were possible.

  “I assume this is about Milly?” he says, looking slightly more animated now. “Have you found out who did it? Do you know who killed her?”

  “Not yet, no,” I reply. “Can we sit down, do you think?”

  His face falls again as he perhaps realises that I’m not the bearer of good news. Even so, he indicates the sofa against the wall, standing in front of the chair and waiting for Thompson and I to take a seat before sitting himself, staring across at me expectantly.

  “What’s this about, Inspector?” he asks.

  I pause, just for a second, wondering how to phrase my question, but then decide there’s no point in beating about the bush. “I have to ask, Mr Higgs… were you aware of the fact that Miss Ryder was expecting a baby?”

  For a few moments, Sam continues to stare, but then his mouth drops open, his eyes widen and his face contorts, not in pain or grief like yesterday, but in anger… in overwhelming rage, as he leaps to his feet again.

  “She was pregnant?” he shouts.

  Thompson stands as well, holding out his hands. “Calm down,” he says soothingly.

  “Calm down?” Sam repeats. “Are you kidding?” He turns to me again. “He’s just told me that my dead fiancée was pregnant, and you want me to calm down?”

  I get up myself now, wondering why any of us bothered to sit in the first place.

  “Mr Higgs,” I say, trying to keep my voice as placid as possible, “this isn’t helping.”

  He takes a step closer, standing just an inch or so from me, breathing heavily, and I’m aware of Thompson moving nearer, even as I hold out my hand to keep him back. “You think I care?” Sam says, tears welling in his eyes now. “You think I care about what helps and what doesn’t?”

  “Probably not, no.”

  He sucks in a deep breath, runs his fingers through his hair and moves away, going over to the window now, staring out at goodness knows what, while his shoulders heave up and down as he tries to regain control of his emotions. “How… how far gone was she?” he asks, not turning around.

  “Three months,” I reply.

  He lowers his head, then turns back to face us, his eyes narrowed. “Three months?” I nod my head. “Three months… so that would make it November?”

  “Yes.”

  “Around the time she postponed our wedding…” His voice fades and he covers his face with his hands, a picture of agony. “How could she?” he says eventually, lowering his hands and raising his face to the ceiling, his voice loud, and yet strangled at the same time. “How could she do something like that?”

  “Can I take it the baby wasn’t yours, then?” I query, even though I already know the answer.

  “Of course it bloody well wasn’t,” he replies, lowering his head again, his eyes dark with barely contained fury.

  “I’m sorry,” I say softly. “I have to ask.”

  “Do you?” he says. “Do you really?” He glares at me. “I may not be sophisticated, or worldly-wise,” he says, coming back into the centre of the room again, “but I know how things work. I’m not stupid.” He stops talking and shakes his head. “Except, it seems I am. Because I fell for her lies… the little slut.” I startle at his words, but before I can comment, he continues, “We were waiting. W—We agreed to wait until we were married, before we slept together… or at least I did, because that’s what she wanted, for God’s sake. And when she asked me to postpone the wedding, that was a bloody hard decision to make, because I really didn’t want to have to wait any longer. But she begged me, and in the end, I went along with it, rather than upset her.” He pauses, taking a breath. “Only now it seems the little tart was lying to me. She was sleeping with someone else the whole time, wasn’t she?”

  “You shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” I point out, but he sneers at me, his face an ugly contortion.

  “Grow up, Inspector,” he says. “My fiancée was pregnant by another man… and however you want to try and dress it up, there’s only one conclusion any man can draw from that. She wasn’t the woman I thought she was. She was a filthy lying whore, and I’m well rid of her.” His voice breaks as he finishes his sentence and he turns away. “I’d like you to go now,” he manages to say.

  I put on my hat, stunned by the change in this young man, and Thompson does likewise, making his way over to the door, although I remain standing where I am.

  “You’re leaving tomorrow evening, I understand?” I say, surprised by the harshness of my own voice now.

  “Yes.” Sam Higgs turns around and faces me. “What of it?”

  “I need to know how I can contact you.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.” He has a supercilious look on his face that just raises my anger another notch and I take a step closer to him, using my height to full advantage.

  “You can… and you will,” I say, sternly. “I’m not asking for anything confidential, I just need to know the name of your regiment, and your vague whereabouts for the next few weeks.”

  “And if I refuse to tell you?” he says, childishly.

  “Then I’ll waste valuable police time finding out the information for myself. And once I have, I’ll apply to your CO to have you kept here until my enquiries have been completed. It’s entirely up to you, Mr Higgs.”

  He sighs and murmurs, “Fine,” under his breath. “I don’t want to say here any longer than I have to. I’m joining the East Surreys and I’ve been ordered to report to Kingston. No-one’s actually told us where we’re going for our training. Not yet.” He’s suddenly a little more reasonable and I nod my head.

  “Very wel
l. I’ll be able to trace you through the barracks in Kingston, should I need to.”

  “Do you think you’ll need to?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  I touch the brim of my hat in farewell, and join Thompson, who holds the door open, letting me pass outside, where he joins me, closing the door behind us.

  “You’re not being at your most understanding today, are you?” he says, a little gruffly as he gets into the car beside me, slamming the door and starting the engine.

  “Excuse me?” I turn to face him, noting the sour expression on his face.

  “Well, how would you have felt if you’d discovered Amelie was pregnant by another man right before your wedding?”

  “How do you think I’d have felt?” I huff back at him. “Are you forgetting that I have a better understanding than most of how Sam Higgs feels? You slept with my fiancée, if you remember?”

  It may have been more than six years ago, and I may have realised, after I met Amelie and fell in love with her, that I actually had a lucky escape as far as my previous fiancée was concerned, but I do at least have some knowledge of how it feels to be cheated on and lied to, and I’m not in the mood for being criticised by the man who was responsible.

  He turns and glares at me. “Yes, but I didn’t know who she was at the time, and I didn’t get her pregnant, and in any case, I thought we’d put that behind us,” he replies.

  “We did.”

  “Then why are you bringing it up?”

  “Because you’re judging me; you’re judging my opinions and my reactions when – quite frankly – you don’t have the right.”

  “Are you honestly telling me that you can’t sympathise with how Sam Higgs feels?” he says, still surprised, evidently.

  “Yes, I am.” I raise my voice and he stares at me, then shakes his head and pulls the car away from the kerb.

  I sit in silence for a moment and then turn to face the front of the car.

  “Based on Sam’s response to the news of Mildred’s death, I think he loved her very deeply, and that’s why I don’t understand his reaction now. He’s behaving like I did when Victoria cheated… all anger and bluster… and I didn’t love her at all. He’s making it about him, just like I did. But I know now how different it is, when you’re really in love… so, in answer to your question, if I’d discovered that Amelie was pregnant by another man right before our wedding, I would have been devastated. But, I would have wanted to know why she’d done it. I would have wanted to know what had caused her to cheat on me. I would have wanted to understand. And I would never – ever – have called her names. I’m not saying that I’d be able to just forgive and forget, because I wouldn’t. But I know I wouldn’t be able to cut her out of my life either, like I did with Victoria, or like Sam seems to want to do with Mildred. Can’t you see?” I turn and look at him, but he’s concentrating on driving – or at least he’s pretending to – so I continue, “Can’t you see that it doesn’t fit? The descriptions we’ve been given of Mildred, even by Sam Higgs, don’t tie in with someone who’d lie and cheat, and sleep around. Everyone we’ve spoken to has told us how kind and generous she was, that she was a sweet, lovely girl, that she’d do anything for anyone, and was always putting herself out for other people. It doesn’t add up, Harry. Okay, so Sam might be willing to think that Mildred was a slut, but that’s just his ego talking and, when he’s calmed down, I hope he’ll think differently about her, because I don’t think she deserves this.” I pause for a second and take a breath. “And in the meantime,” I say more softly, “I’m going to do everything I can to prove him wrong.”