Blood on the Wood (24 page)

‘Do you think that?'

‘I don't know. Would many people know the cabinet was here?'

‘The whole village, I suppose. Mr Bestley the carter brought it up on Monday morning and he's the biggest gossip in the district.'

‘What about when it was in the workshop. Did anybody show any special interest in it?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘Would you mind if I went there tomorrow and asked Mr Sutton?'

She looked worried. ‘Do you really need to do that?'

‘You don't want me to?'

‘It's just that you might not get a lot of sense out of Mr Sutton at the moment. His wife Janie's left him, just up and taken the baby without saying a word. He can't think or talk about anything else.'

‘Why did she go?'

‘He doesn't know. Oh God, everything's such a mess.'

She seemed so brittle with worry and tiredness that I didn't press the point.

‘Where's Daniel? Can I talk to him?' I said.

‘In the music room. He says there's something he wants to finish before … you know.'

She got up, led the way across the hall and tapped on a door.

‘Daniel, Miss Bray.'

*   *   *

She left me at the door. Daniel opened it. The top of the upright piano behind him was scattered with sheets of music. He had a pen in his hand, ink blots on his fingers.

‘Do you think I'm heartless, trying to work? Not that it's any good anyway.'

He plumped himself back on the piano stool, leaving me to take a seat by the table. It was a small room, very much a musician's workshop, with an upright piano, a guitar, and a concertina on the table. Music stands and a cello case were pushed against the wall.

‘Did Carol tell you the inspector was waiting for me when I got back last night? Wanted to know where I'd been. I didn't tell him I'd been up to see you but he asked about you anyway.'

‘What?'

‘Had I spoken to you since last Tuesday? I said it was none of his business. But I got the impression he wants to talk to you again. He seems to be in a pretty savage temper with all of us.'

That was predictable, but bad news all the same.

‘What else did he ask you?'

‘More about where I'd been on Monday afternoon. In here, I said, trying to work or out strolling around because I couldn't work. When? Had anybody seen me? How am I supposed to know who saw me or who didn't?'

So I'd been right. Inspector Bull had done the same sums as I had, probably more accurately.

‘Did he ask you about the gun again?'

‘How many squirrels I'd bagged – very sarcastic.'

‘And you stuck to the story that you'd had it with you all afternoon?'

‘Yes.'

‘Tell me, did you put it under the blanket in the summer-house?'

He brought his fist crashing down on the piano keys.

‘For heaven's sake, don't you start. Haven't I had enough of it from the police? You're supposed to be on my side.'

‘If I'm on anybody's side, it's Daisy's.'

‘Too late for her.'

‘I know. But you can't rely on my being on your side or anybody else's side. If you want me here, you're going to have to put up with my questions.'

He sighed, loud and exasperated, like a child giving in reluctantly.

‘Ask, then.'

‘I've asked. Did you put the revolver under the blanket?'

‘No.'

‘Had you seen it or handled it that day, before I gave it to you down at the camp?'

‘If I answer that, are you going to tell the police?'

‘I reserve the right to, yes.'

‘Then I reserve the right not to answer.'

‘Very well, when I gave it to you, you said you thought two rounds had been fired. Do you remember that?'

‘Yes.' Reluctantly.

‘Looking back, do you still think so?'

He frowned down at the piano keys. ‘It's difficult, but yes.'

‘Why did you notice that in particular?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Think, then. Wasn't it an odd thing to notice in the circumstances?'

‘Habit, I suppose. You know Aunt Philly used to have shooting competitions with Adam and me? The game was, you'd have five shots each at the bottles. Then when you'd fired your five and the chamber was empty you had to pass the gun on to the next one, to reload. As a kid, I always enjoyed breaking open the gun.'

‘I heard one shot in the garden,' I said. ‘If that wasn't the one that killed Daisy, there must have been another earlier.'

‘I suppose so.'

I didn't tell him about my researches into rigor mortis.

‘There's something else I want to ask you,' I said. ‘In the ordinary way it would be none of my business but you brought me into this, after all.'

‘Go on.'

‘You remember that Saturday, when we first met at the camp? I had a strong impression that at that point you hadn't seen Felicia since you'd got back.'

He wrinkled his forehead, as if it were too far back to think about. ‘Wasn't that when I'd just got back here with Daisy? No, I didn't see Felicia until the next day, when I told her the engagement was off.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes. I wouldn't forget a thing like that, would I?'

‘I ask because somebody is sure they heard you and Felicia talking together in a cart shed near the camp, some time before it got dark on the Saturday evening.'

‘Who?' He twisted round on the piano stool. ‘It's just not true. Who have you been talking to?'

‘That doesn't matter. The point is, what the person thinks she—'

‘So it's a she, is it, this gossip?'

‘That doesn't matter either. She heard a man she believed to be you talking to a woman with what she described as a toff's voice. She didn't see either of them. The woman said “We should never have done it. What if they find out?” The man comforted her and said they wouldn't know. He called her Flissie.'

‘He called her
what?'
Daniel jumped up. His face was so close to my own that I could feel the heat of his breath and he looked furious. ‘I'm supposed to have been in a cart shed with Felicia and called her Flissie?'

‘Were you?'

‘Listen, this is important. If I'd never told the truth before in my life I'd be telling it now. I've never, as it happens, on any occasion been in any cart shed with Felicia. More than that, I'm totally and utterly incapable of calling her
Flissie.
'

The depth of loathing he put into the last two syllables spattered my face. He apologised and took a step back, but still looked furious.

‘Why not?'

‘Just think about it. I'm a musician. What I do best is setting words to music. That means you have to like words, hear the music in them. About the first thing I said to Felicia' was that she had a beautiful name. It practically sings itself.' He sat down again, played and sang ‘Fel-ic-i-a', the four syllables clear and high as a blackbird's song. ‘Then I'm supposed to have called her Flissie.
Fliss-ee.
Listen to it. Like a coster-monger whistling to his dog. I hate it when the others call her that. I tell you, I may be guilty of all kinds of stupidity, I may even be guilty of murder if you like, but I could never, ever be capable of uttering an atrocity like
Flissie.
'

He took a deep breath and sagged with his head just above the keys. The ridiculous thing was that I believed him. But then I'd believed Sally too and, looking back, I still did.

*   *   *

I left him there, let myself quietly out of the front door and went back down the road to the village. The key to Mrs Penny's cottage was under the geraniums as promised. There was no sign of her but a fat marmalade cat kept me company and cadged scraps while I ate cold beef with home-made piccalilli and drank very stewed tea at the kitchen table. Afterwards I went upstairs and after a long struggle managed to persuade the old oil lamp on the washstand to give out just enough light to read by. I'd brought a pile of papers and magazines from London with me and one of them happened to be Hawthorne's publication the
Wrecker.
I sat down on the bed with it, turning pages idly until I came to something that made me sit up. It had a panel to itself and was headed, in bold black type,
A TALE OF MODERN TIMES.
I read on, fearing the worst, and got it.

Once upon a week ago in a not far away county – let us call it Oxfordshire – a handsome young prince went looking for a bride. His princely choice fell on a beautiful girl with long red hair – let us call her Daisy—who played the violin and sang and danced better than anybody else in the kingdom. So the handsome young prince took her away from her friends and said to his family, “This is the princess I am going to marry.' But his family were proud and wealthy. They said, ‘She is no princess, for all that she sings and plays the violin and dances better than anyone in the kingdom. She is born of the working classes and has no money.' So they killed the red-haired girl, and the young prince was sad for a while, but soon found himself another bride who was not beautiful and could not sing or dance or play the violin but was born of the upper classes and had a lot of money. This is a true story, gentle reader, but you will not find it in any of your other so-called newspapers, because if they were to print it people might ask questions which would anger other people in high places – such as whether it is right that girls should be killed because they come from the working classes and have no money or what the police in Oxfordshire – led by a wise and kindly Inspector with a name something like Ox – are doing to put the murderers of the girl in prison. But then, if you think our brave boys in blue will ever defend the rights of the working classes against the taking classes, then you really do believe in fairy tales.

If anything had been needed to make matters worse, this was it. Hawthorne's total disregard for the laws of libel was notorious and had already caused two or three publications to sink under him, but this was beyond his worst. If Inspector Bull had read it – and I wouldn't put it past Hawthorne to have posted a copy to him – it explained the bad temper Daniel had noticed.

Soon after that the little supply of oil in the lamp gave out so I got undressed in the dark and dozed. It was an uneasy doze because my room was just opposite the public house. Although the village was quiet by day, the pub in the evening seemed to be a magnet for men from miles around. Heavy boots tramped up and down the street, voices called out cheerful insults in local accents to friends leaving or arriving. As the evening went on there was some singing, all of it music hall songs, nothing to excite the folk-song collectors. Even though the noise stopped me from sleeping it was pleasant enough in its way and I half listened to the comings and goings to stop my mind tramping round in the familiar circles about Daisy. All of a sudden something very different from the rest of the noise jolted me into full wakefulness. One pair of heavy boots marching, like the rest, up the street towards the pub. A man singing as he came, already sounding as if he'd had a drink or three. But it was what he was singing that set my heart thumping: ‘A varmer he lived in the West Countree, And he had daughters one, two and three.'

I made a jump for the window, but by the time I got there the singing had stopped and all I could see was the back of a man silhouetted against the yellow lamplight from the pub doorway. Then the door closed on him. I started getting into my clothes, scrabbling in the dark for skirt and blouse, with no plan in my mind except to see the man and talk to him. A woman hurtling into the public bar would scandalise the village but there was no help for it. Buttons done up skew-whiff, not bothering with stockings, I dived under the bed, looking for my second shoe.

It was while I was under there that the fighting started. I heard the pub door opening, a roar of protest, a shout of, ‘I told you to get out and stay out!' The crash of my head against the bed frame drowned the next few words and by the time I'd stopped seeing stars and shuffled over to the window the fight was down to ground level, with what looked like two or three men wrestling on the pub doorstep and others standing round shouting. Presumably one of the fighters was my singer, but there was nothing to distinguish him in a writhing mass of arms, legs and backs. A cry went up ‘Police! Police coming.' The writhing mass became vertical and a man tore himself away from it and ran heavily down the street. Within a few strides he'd gone beyond the light from the pub doorway and into darkness. I found my shoe, went downstairs as quickly as I could in the dark and let myself out on to the street. There was still a lot of excitement round the pub doorway, but no sign of a policeman, so that had probably been somebody's bright idea to break things up.

‘… told him last night I didn't want him in here.'

‘Not us owes him money, any road.'

‘Bit me. Bugger tried to bite my ear off.'

I ran past them, down the street in the direction the man had gone, but the time it had taken me to find my shoe and get downstairs had given him two minutes' or so start. Soon I was through the village and on a country road with hedges both sides, nothing but darkness beyond. He could be anywhere, in a ditch not far from where I was standing or out in the fields, and much though I wanted to speak to him it made no sense to track a violent man across country on my own.

More slowly I went back up the street to the pub. Men were still standing and talking outside and by this time they'd recovered enough from the excitement to notice me. When I came into the light and they saw I was a stranger they stopped talking, startled rather than hostile.

‘Good evening, miss,' one of them said. He looked like the landlord, a big plump man with a brown apron over his clothes.