by Amy Myers
‘If they can. I don’t know whether this applies to Ada Proctor or not, but I want to find out more. If there’s nothing, I’ll go away. If there is, I’ll hunt down as much as I can until I reach the facts about what really happened.’
He thought this over, and gave a reluctant nod, to her relief. ‘I’ll show you. You missed it.’ He took her to one of the stands and pointed out a postcard of a rather nondescript late-Victorian villa. ‘Taken about 1910, that was. The Firs, it was called.’
‘And who owns it now?’ She couldn’t recall seeing it.
‘Pulled down for development years ago. Flying bomb fell on it.’
Without her asking – though she was aware she was being judged – he took her round the rest of the exhibition, explaining in such detail where and what everything was that the village began to blow into life in her imagination.
‘That’s Wickenham Manor.’ He pointed out a large classical eighteenth-century house, surrounded by gardens. ‘Hasn’t changed much, for all it’s a hotel now. Grounds were even bigger before the war, they had to sell off some. No such person as Squire Bloomfield any longer, though the family’s still in the village and they own the hotel.’
‘Would they know anything about the Proctor murder?’
‘Might do. Tell ’em I sent you.’ A pause. ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’
‘No. I come from the other side of the Medway. One of the enemy to you,’ she told him gravely. The ancient division of Man of Kent and Kentish Man still seemed to make a difference, so she always trod carefully.
‘Got no murders of your own to look into?’ He was replying in kind, not necessarily offputtingly, she considered, but she was still under the microscope.
‘It’s this one interests me. It seems so –’ she sought for the right word – ‘unlikely.’
‘Why’s that then?’
Time to prove herself again, but Georgia was used to that, and gave him a straight answer. ‘From the newspaper reports Ada doesn’t seem the type of woman to fall for a gardener, especially one nearly half her age, so what were they doing out there together – if they were?’
‘We don’t know, do we? What folks are like, I mean.’ There was a pause, and then he added, ‘You need Bert Todd in the almshouse. You’ll find him there – if he’s not in the Green Man.’
‘I telephoned him, but he said he wasn’t related to Davy.’ She remembered the call vividly. It had been the shortest one she’d made. He’d just said, ‘No, I ain’t’, and put the phone down.
‘He would, wouldn’t he? Nobody wants an uncle who was hung for murder. You could try and talk him round. Tell him Jim Hardbent sent you.’
‘Thank you.’ Georgia was really grateful. A door-opener at last, and she wouldn’t abuse it. ‘How would you feel if my father and I – we work together – think there’s a case for writing a book about the Proctor murder?’ Stick to specifics. Jim Hardbent wasn’t going to appreciate talk of Wickenham’s having the wrong sort of ‘sniff’.
A long pause now, which she didn’t understand, was relieved when he finally answered, ‘I daresay I’ll read it. If it’s done right.’
How to interpret that? He was waiting for her reaction, so she wasn’t out of the wood yet.
She plunged in: ‘These postcards of yours. They tell the truth, don’t they, even though it’s the truth of a hundred years ago. We’re standing looking at them from a distance, not judging, yet making our own decisions about them. That’s what my father’s and my books do. Okay?’
Yet another pause, then: ‘My dad used to talk about that case,’ he reflected. ‘He was at school with Davy Todd.’
‘Was he?’ She pounced eagerly on this. ‘What sort of boy was Davy? Did your dad know Ada too?’
‘Davy was a funny one, Dad said, only he never said why. And Ada, well, she was the doctor’s daughter. They didn’t mix. There was a lot of talk, Dad used to say, that Davy wasn’t the only one she went with.’
‘He didn’t deny they had arranged a meeting, but according to the trial report said it was for the following night. Even so, why would she have been daft enough to choose to go into the fields with him?’
‘He was the gardener. She couldn’t carry on with him under her dad’s nose, could she? Had to do her courting elsewhere. That wasn’t the first time she’d been in the fields with Davy or one of the others, so Dad said.’
Here we go. She was getting nearer the heart of it now. ‘She didn’t look like someone with a train of lovers, in the pictures I’ve seen.’
‘Never do, do they?’ Jim added darkly.
Greatly cheered that there might indeed be more to discover about Ada, she decided to explore the churchyard. Ada’s father would surely have chosen to bury her here; the only question was whether the grave would be here at St Nicholas or in the new cemetery she had passed on the way in to Wickenham. The church was on one corner of the Wickenham estate between the Green Man and the drive up to the hotel, and its churchyard was reasonably large. From a glance at the first tombstones she saw, she was in the right place. The name Hardbent was prominent on several of them, confirming her theory that Jim had been born in Wickenham. It took her some time to find the cluster of graves for the Proctors. Ada’s parents were here, and several more forebears. Ada lay next to her parents, with a simple headstone: ‘Ada Proctor, 1892–1929. Dear Daughter to Edward and Winifred. Rest in Peace.’ The grave was neglected and overgrown, though not decaying, and she wondered who had ministered to it after her father’s death. The Todds?
She returned to the pub with a new impetus. She would leave the Bloomfields for the moment, but that evening she introduced herself to Bert Todd. He wasn’t hard to find in the Green Man bar. A nut of a man, occupying a corner stool that had ‘regular’ written all over it, and indeed she remembered seeing him there at lunchtime too.
‘Ah. Jim said you’d be here asking questions. I don’t like nosy women,’ was his encouraging opening.
‘Nor do I,’ she returned. ‘I’m interested, not nosy. That’s different. Can I buy you a pint?’
‘That’s all right by me, but the answer’s the same. I don’t talk.’
‘Fair enough.’ Georgia fetched the pint and placed it before him. ‘I can understand,’ she told him, as she perched on the next stool. ‘You assume your uncle was guilty, so obviously you don’t want to talk about it.’
He spluttered into his beer, taken aback. ‘I just don’t talk. See?’
‘Suppose he wasn’t guilty. I’m not saying he was innocent, because I don’t know if he was. But I want to know more about the case.’
‘Look, missis, I don’t come to the pub to waste time arguing with a blessed woman – I got one at home for that.’ She laughed and he cheered up. ‘No disrespect, mind.’
‘No offence taken.’
‘Look, I’ll tell you,’ he offered nobly. ‘I dunno if Uncle Davy was guilty or innocent, but you couldn’t blame the poor devil if he did do it. There he was, twenty years old, good-looking lad from his pictures, led on by the lady at the house. A teaser was Ada Proctor. Any fellow would do. Married, young, old, all the same to her. Mind you, according to what my granny said, she wasn’t right in the head. Lost her fiancé in the Great War and went for anything in trousers after that.’
‘Is there anyone in the village old enough to remember Davy or the Proctors? I’d like to talk to everyone I can.’
‘The old doctor died not long after Miss Ada, and she was his only child, so that’s them gone. As for Davy, I reckon Cousin Ned and me are the only ones who’d know about him. From our dads, that is. Ned would only have been two when Davy took a header, but Ned’s family weren’t living here then. I was born that year, 1930.’
‘And no Elgins left?’
He took a swig of his pint. ‘Not that I can think of. There’s people that might remember, but not know, if you take my meaning.’
By the time she reached her room that evening, she was ready to crash out, but fo
rced herself to make notes on what she’d achieved that day. She’d made a good start, she told herself, looking at the scribbled results, though she had a slight niggle of doubt that she might be missing something here. Tomorrow she’d work the notes up on to the laptop for Peter’s benefit, she reassured herself, and any queries would surface then.
It must all come back to Ada Proctor. Was she Woman A or Woman B, the obedient reserved daughter or the sex-crazy rebel? Or both? Now there was a thought. It was all very well listening to Bert’s story but hearsay and gossip could distort. Furthermore he was a Todd and the family might well have passed down an unflattering picture of Ada. Georgia was uncomfortably aware that she didn’t usually focus so much on one person or aspect of a case until much further forward than she was with Wickenham. Ada was different, she told herself, or was it that she, Georgia, wanted her to be so? Ada was in her thirties, single, living with and working for her father. Ada had lost her fiancé in the war. Was she, Georgia wondered, seeing comparisons here? Had Ada balanced her life on a tightrope, unable to leave the past totally behind, and unable to move forward because of its shadows?
Georgia shivered. She had her own shadows, and Zac was only one of them. Shadows had to be faced. Had Ada done so, or had she hidden away in her role as doctor’s daughter and assistant? Or had she rebelled by taking lovers?
Get a grip, Georgia, she ordered herself. You, my girl, are raving. Ada was probably precisely what she seemed in the trial reports, a dutiful daughter who had turned to other means than marriage to fulfil her life. As for herself, fortunately the shadows were only temporary visitors.
The next morning Georgia tucked into her researcher’s treat of a full English breakfast, and considered her options with a clear mind. She decided to head back to the postcard exhibition for another look and to firm up on Jim’s co-operation. She was aware that this couldn’t yet be taken for granted, and this, she realized, was the reason for her niggle of doubt. She sensed he was still reserving judgement on her, so why give her his co-operation so comparatively quickly? Whatever the reason, he wasn’t going to provide help out of the kindness of his heart; she had to earn it.
Before that, however, she decided to find the spot where Ada had died. The field called Crown Lea lay at the end of a byway, a grassy lane leading off the main road which she remembered seeing on the far side of the village from Wickenham Manor, near the old teashop. She took the map with her, and found the footpath that Ada must have taken – in the dark! It was one thing walking up a byway in broad daylight, quite another to walk along a footpath over a field at night-time. Even a torch wouldn’t make it a comfortable walk. By daylight this field looked innocuous, full of the stubble of recently harvested corn. There was nothing to mark where Ada had died, nothing but the wind to erase the present and help reconstruct the past.
Eventually Georgia gave up the attempt. If Ada had left fingerprints, they weren’t here. She needed to know more, much more before this field would begin to make sense. Frustrated, she returned to the village hall and the at least part-known quantity of Jim Hardbent. She found him busy talking to a group of visitors to the exhibition, but eventually she secured his attention, and managed to her great satisfaction to end up with another tour and a vague mention of possible documents that he might or might not have. Nevertheless there was something here she wasn’t catching.
‘There’s a skeleton been found down a denehole,’ he mentioned. ‘Did you hear about that?’ He might have sounded casual, but it was a definite prod.
‘Yes.’ Guiltily, Georgia remembered Peter’s conviction that the skeleton would prove to be the more important trail, yet here she was, getting blinkered by Ada. ‘Do you know of any missing people in Wickenham?’
This sounded a broad question even to her, and Jim stared at her as though she’d taken leave of her senses.
‘Depends what time of year and when. This was a hop area, Georgia. You know about hops?’
‘Yes, stupid of me,’ she told him cheerfully, acknowledging her own idiocy. Every year in September, hundreds of pickers would have descended on villages such as Wickenham. The casuals, who travelled from village to village looking for seasonal work, would come together with the pickers from London, who saw it as their annual holiday, and local pickers from neighbouring villages. In addition, every vagrant for miles around would see a chance of earning some cash. If one of them fell down a denehole, who would know – or care?
‘Maybe’ she suggested, ‘this skeleton was a victim of murder as well?’
Jim chuckled. ‘You got murder on the brain, you have. We’re just an ordinary village here. Big on rumours and gossip. Short on facts. Here, come and look at this.’
He took her to the board dedicated to postcards of the church. ‘That’s the old vicarage.’ He pointed to one she’d passed over yesterday; it was of an ivy-clad, gabled Victorian house, which looked ordinary enough. ‘Now that,’ Jim announced with satisfaction, ‘is where dark doings went on, so they say.’
‘Really?’ Georgia grinned as Jim laughed at her eagerness.
‘Old vicar died of poison, some said by accident, most said he was done in.’
‘About the same time as Ada Proctor?’ It was a wild guess and it was wrong.
‘Nope. During the second war, it was.’
Her hopes fell. Still, it was interesting. She reminded herself that red herrings should be a later indulgence, and that Ada Proctor must come first. ‘I’m grateful for your help, Jim. I really am, especially as there are no Proctors or Elgins left in the village.’
‘That what old Toddie told you, did he?’ Jim guffawed. ‘He’s right in his way; all the Proctors are gone, and Vi and Emmy Elgin both married, so Elgin wasn’t their name. They’re gone too, but they’ve family still here.’
‘Why didn’t Bert tell me?’ Georgia was exasperated, even though she should have been used to village ways by now. At least she had unlocked some of Jim’s reserve though.
‘Did it on purpose. You don’t know much about Wickenham, see. The Elgins and the Todds never spoke – and still don’t. The old feud goes on. They was at it way back in the nineteenth century and the murder started it up again, so I heard. The only reason the Todds didn’t leave the village is that the Elgins would have had the last laugh. It’s been quiet recently, but it could flare up again any day. My dad always said that the feud could have been why Mary Elgin’s dad refused to back up Mary’s alibi for Davy. Dad said it was only natural for Mary to lie about Davy being with her, but why make up the bit about her dad, unless it were true?’ He was watching her intently as though, for all his words, he felt a personal stake in this too. Or was it Wickenham rather than Ada Proctor that was his core concern?
‘You’re right, Jim.’ It was a slender straw to cling to. ‘Where can I find the Elgin family?’
‘Well, Mary Beaumont is in a retirement house up on the Downs.’
‘And she was who?’
‘Mary Elgin of course.’ Jim gloated, clearly delighted to be flooring her. ‘Davy Todd’s sweetheart.’
‘Still alive?’ she said faintly.
‘That’s right. She was only seventeen or so at the time of the murder. Later she lived in a cottage near the Green, doing cream teas after old Beaumont hopped it.’
Oh crabby old lady, who loved only her rose. Georgia felt a shiver of excitement. Now she knew why her father had smelled unfinished business in the atmosphere at Wickenham. Or was the shiver one of apprehension too? Peter never failed to warn her that the fingerprints on Time were alive, and that fingers could strangle as well as caress. Take care, Georgia, take care.
Chapter Three
As she drove up The Street, Georgia saw Luke’s car parked outside her father’s house, and drew up behind it. Haden Shaw, high up on the Downs, had no main through road, which meant parking was easy. How long it would remain so, she didn’t care to consider. It was a sleepy village – or appeared so to the outsider – and the façade of the compact terraced
Georgian red-brick houses that lined the street conveyed a warmth and security that made her thankful to scuttle inside this haven each time she returned home.
Usually. Today she was torn between pleasure and annoyance that Peter was jumping the gun by summoning his publisher before she had even reported home. Unusually for these days, their editor Luke Frost owned the firm, which operated from the village of South Mailing, near Maidstone. Luke also played another role in her life. He wanted to marry her, and there were many times when she was in favour of the idea. Something always held her back, however, the something that had Zac written all over it. She no longer loved him, but that didn’t make that shadow stop dogging her. Particularly when it turned into reality from time to time – and there he was again, his grin, his look of innocence, his charm, his genuine warmheartedness, his manipulativeness and – oh hell! Forget him, Georgia. She loved Luke, she loved her work. She walked tall.
She hastily dumped her overnight bag in number 4, her own home, and hurried round to number 2 before too much damage was done in the way of commitment to a project that might or might not turn out to have substance.
As soon as she walked in, Luke came into the hall to greet her, and the look on his face told her that books were not the reason he was here. What she constantly feared must have happened again.
‘Where is he?’ she asked sharply.
‘Margaret’s put him to bed, but he’s not happy.’
Right on cue she heard Peter’s howl from his bedroom on the ground floor at the rear of the cottage. ‘Georgia!’
She hurried to the ground-floor bedroom, somewhat cheered by the strength of the protest. Her father was sitting up in bed, glaring towards her, but he looked a frail old man, not the lion she worked with.
‘What is it, Dad?’ she asked gently, sitting down at his side. ‘The usual one?’
‘Yes.’
So it hadn’t been the shooting incident that had brought this attack on. It was Rick, her younger brother by three years, and the cause of the other shadow over her life. Rick had disappeared in France on a walking holiday ten years ago, and ever since, even before Peter was shot and paralysed a year later, in a drugs set-up with a Customs & Excise team, which had gone badly wrong, he had periodically suffered these terrible nightmares. They began during the night but their effects usually lasted throughout the day, leaving him shaking, white and perspiring, a man in the grip of a mental fever. There’d been no trace of Rick. He’d simply vanished. He’d gone alone; he didn’t come back. I’ll send you a postcard, he said, but it never came, and nor did he.
