Ann Granger (24 page)

Whereas you, I thought to myself, fancy you could do a lot better in that department.

‘I’m quite sure,’ Beresford said firmly, ‘Lucy Craven is as sane as you or I. Rather given to melancholy perhaps, but what young woman in her situation wouldn’t be? I don’t know why her family had to fetch that doctor down here from London.’

His tone grew fierce again. I thought with a little amusement that both he and I disliked Lefebre being in the company of ladies we admired.

‘You’ve met Dr Lefebre?’ I asked.

‘Not yet. But I intend to make his acquaintance before he returns to London and tell him that his advice and interference aren’t needed!’ was the brisk reply.

Perhaps I ought to change the subject. ‘You’ve never employed Brennan as a rat-catcher yourself?’

‘What?’ Beresford appeared to have gone off into some private dream in which he despatched Dr Lefebre back to London never to return. ‘Brennan? Oh, never. I have a terrier of my own.’

He indicated the dog in question, which sprawled a little way off head on paws, and watched us intently with its boot-button eyes.

‘I don’t remember when we last had a rat in the house. They scent the dog and keep away. Get ’em in the stable yard, of course … and out at the farm. But the farm dogs usually do a good job of catching them.’

‘So Brennan never called here?’

‘No, though I’ll ask Gregson if either he or his wife saw anything of him this visit.’

At that point the elderly butler returned.

‘Gregson!’ his employer asked him. ‘Did you see Brennan or his wife anywhere about the village before he died?’

‘No, sir,’ was the prompt reply. ‘I never encouraged the fellow. I believed him a rogue and sorry though I am to speak ill of the dead, to my mind he was a rogue to the last. He knew I was of that opinion and he never showed his face here.’

‘Why did you believe him a rogue?’ I asked.

‘You only had to look at him! A nasty shifty sort of face, he had. No one liked him, that’s a fact. He came from London, too, and everyone knows that’s a place full of knaves and tricksters.’

Beresford gave me an apologetic look but I didn’t disagree with Gregson. London was indeed full of crooks, large and small, and it had been my misfortune to encounter a fair number of the fraternity. But Gregson’s dislike of Brennan seemed more to be rooted in the general mistrust the rat-catcher had inspired round here than in any single hard fact.

‘How about a gypsy woman, selling pegs?’ I asked the old man. ‘Did you or your wife see her recently? She might have come to the kitchen door on Tuesday last.’

Gregson contemplated me. ‘The day of the murder, that would be? Well now, I didn’t see her. But I’ll ask my wife.’

A little later the information arrived with the port that a gypsy woman had indeed called on Tuesday, late in the morning. Mrs Gregson had bought a few pegs.

‘But my wife saw nothing of Brennan nor of that woman he liked to call his wife.’ Gregson gave us a knowing look.

‘I have to find Brennan’s wife,’ I said to Beresford, when the butler had shuffled out again. ‘It’s a matter of urgency. She can’t have vanished. I’d like to find that mysterious gypsy woman, too.’

Beresford promised he would do his best to organise help.

‘I’m glad we found no sign Mrs Brennan perished in the fire today. But I’m as anxious as you to know she’s not come to harm,’ he remarked. ‘Her man’s death will have left her quite destitute, I dare say, and she may need some money.’

My reasons for finding her were less altruistic, but I agreed.

Later I walked back to the inn through the night with only the stars and a lantern lent me by my host to guide me. It was so quiet that I shared the instinctive unease earlier expressed by Morris at the churchyard. The loneliness oppressed me. In the Derbyshire mining village of my childhood it had never been like this, even at night. Men leaving one shift passed others setting out for the pit. A flickering lantern or the crunch of heavy workboots marked the approach of those coal-blackened figures, otherwise invisible in the darkness. Yet one always knew they were there, trudging wearily homeward, exchanging brief words with their replacements as they appeared out of the gloom.

Here? Here I felt I had been marooned like a shipwrecked mariner on a foreign shore. (Lizzie later told me she had felt the same way when she arrived. She had now learned, as I might have warned her, that the natives were not necessarily friendly.)

Where were they all, as Morris had demanded? London was always busy. At that very moment, I knew, the streets gleamed in the gaslight and the population of day had been replaced by the myriad inhabitants of the night. The air was hardly ever silent from the rumble of wheels and clatter of footsteps, the sudden shout, the whispered discussion, the whistling, tuneful or otherwise, of those who walked home unaccompanied and kept up their spirits as best they could.

Some of these night birds were abroad for innocent reasons, going and returning from places of entertainment or toil. Others, as I well knew, were on more sinister or disreputable errands. Painted women, many as young as Lucy Craven or even younger, beckoned invitations from doorways. Gaslight shone from taverns, eating houses and brothels. Ne’er-do-wells and wastrels reeled homeward with empty pockets and aching heads, relieved of their money in the aforementioned places. Even if no one passed by you in the street, in every alley some homeless wretch was huddled or a drunk sprawled unable to take himself any further. They might stir as the constable walked by with his measured tread, turning the beam of his bull’s-eye lantern into nooks and crannies. A thief rifling the pockets of the insensible might slip away before the hand of the Law fell on him. But you were never truly alone. The city never slept.

Here in contrast activity was marked by the rise and setting of the sun. Men and women struggled from their beds with its rays and crawled back into them with its last red glow. It was as if they feared the darkness. Even the wanderers and homeless, one of whose campfires Lizzie might have seen from her window, had found some shelter and wouldn’t venture out of it until dawn. The countryside had barred its doors and slept; no one accompanied the odd straggler like me on the road. Only a poacher might lurk out there in the darkness. But fearful of discovery and the gamekeeper, he’d keep well clear of me.

I passed horses in a field to my right and was grateful for the sound of their snorts and the nearness of other living creatures. They followed me on their side of the hedge until I was beyond their patch of ground. I could hear them moving and smell them; even the heat from their bodies struck my face. They were curious about me and perhaps also desirous of my company. I stumbled along, partly because I couldn’t see where to put my feet, and partly because of the port, which I was unaccustomed to drink; it had muddled my senses.

I must have seemed an oddity to all creatures of the countryside, human and animal. They were in their place; I wasn’t in mine. They were equally strange to me. It made me wonder again quite why I had been requested from London. Was it because those who mattered hereabouts feared a local scandal and, to prevent it, wanted the matter cleared up quickly? Or was it because they feared scandal if the facts
were
discovered by me – and I had been sent here not to succeed but to fail?

If so, they had mistaken their man.

Chapter Sixteen

Inspector Benjamin Ross

THE FOLLOWING morning saw the strategy devised by Lizzie and myself put into action. I went early to the churchyard to await the arrival of the ladies and also because I wanted to look at the grave of Mrs Craven’s child. A wilting bunch of wild flowers and foliage lay atop it; otherwise nothing remarkable. I turned back towards the church and heard myself hailed.

‘Good morning, sir!’

An elderly man was hobbling rapidly towards me with a gleeful expression on his face. My heart sank. Was this the oldest inhabitant about to relate his life story to me?

‘Jarvis!’ gasped the old fellow as he reached me. ‘I’m the sexton of this fine building.’

‘Good morning, Mr Jarvis,’ I returned, ‘I was just—’

‘You’re a visitor!’ he crowed, rubbing his hands. ‘You want to see the church. You’d like me to open it up for you.’

I began to tell him not to bother but changed my mind. I had to give him some explanation for my loitering here and besides, when Lizzie arrived with Mrs Craven, I would need somewhere private to talk to the lady.

‘If you would be so kind,’ I said.

‘Come along, come along, sir!’ cried Jarvis, hobbling back the way he’d come and gesturing at me to follow him with wild circular movements of his right arm.

By the time we reached the church porch he was fumbling with a ring of keys similar to a gaoler’s and after clanking them impressively and quite unnecessarily, finally opened the old oak door and pushed it creaking inward.

A smell of dusty hassocks, candle wax and stale flower water wafted out. I followed the old man down two worn stone steps and we stood at the foot of the nave.

‘This church,’ gasped my guide, ‘was built by William the Conqueror.’

It was Norman, certainly, as its round arches and massive pillars bore witness. I murmured some expression of interest.

‘You’ll observe we have no stained glass, sir. It was Cromwell who knocked it out. But there are some fragments in that window there, do you see it? The old rector found them and had them put in the present window. He was a great man for antiquities, was the old rector.’

I wondered when the ‘old’ rector had held the living. Probably when Jarvis was a stripling and the whole of this coast waited for the Napoleonic fleet to sail up the Solent.

‘Down here,’ cried Jarvis, waving me onward again, ‘there’s a very interesting tomb.’

He might as well have been a gaoler and I his prisoner. I followed him meekly and found myself staring down at a plain coffin-shaped stone monument without inscription of any kind.

‘It’s a crusader tomb!’ declared Jarvis, pointing at it triumphantly.

I couldn’t argue but I did think the tomb might have been anyone’s. It was very old, however. I expressed proper admiration.

‘And on the wall there,’ Jarvis’s gnarled forefinger directed my gaze upward, ‘is a handsome memorial, very fine bit of work that. That’s one of the Meager family, sir. They are gentry hereabouts.’

I had at least heard of the Meagers, thanks to Beresford. It prompted me to ask if the Beresford family had any similar memorials. Yes, they did, a whole row of brass tablets.

‘They were all very distinguished gentlemen, sir, this one…’

I realised I was about to be given the entire Beresford family history followed, no doubt, by the biography of each and every Meager. Jarvis would still be droning on when Lizzie arrived with Mrs Craven.

‘Thank you for your trouble,’ I broke in, hastily pressing half-a-crown into his hand. ‘Perhaps you could leave the church open for a little so that I can study everything in detail?’

‘Oh, I won’t be back to lock it up again until noon,’ he assured me, pocketing his half-a-crown. ‘You take all the time you like, sir. I do know who you are, sir. You’re the gentleman from London. You’re an officer of the law, you are, and I can leave the church safe in your keeping. You won’t go scratching your name on the pillars or stealing the prayer books. I dare say that in London you don’t have churches half as interesting as this one, eh?’ He peered up at me.

‘Not quite like this one,’ I told him and he seemed happy with that.

I wasn’t surprised he had recognised me. I thought now that I identified him as one of the two old men who had been in the taproom of the Acorn when I’d arrived with Morris. He hobbled away and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I hadn’t got rid of Jarvis a moment too soon. When I went outside again into the mild sunshine I saw Lizzie and Lucy Craven approaching the church. I took off my hat and walked to meet them, doing my best to look inoffensive.

‘Oh, Lucy,’ said Lizzie as I came up, ‘this is Inspector Ross, the man I was telling you of. He would like to talk to you.’ She took Lucy’s hand. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

I’d been curious to see the lady. My first impression was that she was very young, as I’d been forewarned. My second impression was that she was very frightened.

‘Don’t be alarmed, ma’am,’ I urged her. ‘I realise all this has been very difficult for you but I should be very grateful for ten minutes of your time.’

She stared at me with remarkable blue eyes. ‘Lizzie says you are a nice man,’ she said simply.

‘I’m grateful for Miss Martin’s recommendation. But I’m also a police officer, you know that.’

‘Yes, of course I do. You want to talk about that man, Brennan.’

Lizzie had prepared the ground well. Mrs Craven sounded weary but resigned.

‘If you’d just give me your account of your discovery,’ I encouraged her. ‘I’m sorry if it distresses you but I need to hear it from your own lips. Perhaps we could go into the church and sit down? The sexton, Jarvis, was here and opened it for me.’

Lizzie murmured that she would just take a turn round the churchyard and rejoin us in a few minutes. She walked away and Lucy watched her go with dismay.

‘Please, ma’am,’ I said, indicating the church with my hat. ‘Just a few words and it’ll all be done and over with.’

She nodded and we began to walk towards the porch but when we reached it she stopped suddenly and asked anxiously, ‘Do you think Jarvis will come back?’

‘Not until noon, he assured me.’

‘I shouldn’t like to be locked in. He might think you gone and lock the door with us both inside.’

‘Believe me, ma’am, he knows I’m in the church and if he should come back early, he’d hear us talking, anyway. But it will be perfectly all right. I gave him half-a-crown.’

I smiled at her and after a moment’s hesitation she returned the smile uncertainly.

‘Then it will be a little while before he returns,’ she said. ‘He will have gone directly to The Acorn.’

I followed her into the dim cool interior and she sat down on a pew at the back within sight of the door, no doubt as a precaution should the sexton after all reappear early.