Blood on the Wood (33 page)

‘I didn't have a chance to ask. We might find out tomorrow when her husband brings her back.'

She picked up a fine brush, loaded it with black and gave the swans eyes. If the news had raised her spirits, there was no sign of it.

‘At least he'll be able to work again,' I said.

‘At what? The wreck's total, you know. Everything's going: the house, the workshop. That hairy communist friend of yours…'

‘Not really my friend.'

‘Well, he's right. It isn't economic, making furniture the way we do. The world's not built that way and it's no use fighting it.'

‘So what will happen to them?'

‘Back to the railway carriages, I suppose.'

‘What caused the wreck? Was it what Hawthorne wrote?'

‘It didn't help, but I can't blame him for all of it. Poor Philomena didn't leave us as well off as we'd hoped and we've been … been trying to juggle things I suppose since she died. Only we didn't juggle well enough. You get tired in the end.'

‘So what will happen to you?' I said.

‘We've already had an offer for the house. A brewer from Birmingham. Quite good taste, as it happens. He'll take it furniture and all.'

A gesture with her brush round the studio. One of the reasons why it looked odd and abandoned already was the space at the heart of it where the dark oak cabinet had stood. Some of the other furniture must have been pushed back to make room for it and the whole arrangement had lost its balance.

‘It's gone back to my friends,' she said, guessing what I was thinking. ‘Goodness knows what they'll do with it. The police did their measurements and took photographs before it went.'

‘There's another little mystery about Janie,' I said.

‘Oh God, aren't there enough of them?'

‘Her husband was sure she took that money from the chest on Wednesday night. It can't have been her, though. She was at that awful place in Swindon by then.'

She said nothing, sitting back on her heels and staring at the swans.

‘And he was certain too that only you, he and Janie knew the money was there.'

‘Well, he was wrong about one thing, so maybe he was wrong about the other.'

She got to her feet in one supple movement, not using her hands. ‘Thank you for finding poor Janie. Was there anything else you wanted to ask?'

‘I don't think so.'

She put her head on one side and looked at me.

‘You're not sure, are you? Or rather you are sure, but you don't want to say it. Is it to do with that talk you had with poor Flissie?'

‘How did you know about that?'

‘She didn't confide in me, but I guessed where she was going. She needed to tell somebody. If I'd encouraged her at all I think she'd have even told me.'

‘That she and Adam…'

‘Were lovers? Yes, I knew.'

‘And didn't mind?'

Her eyes looked as sad as something left out in the rain but she only shrugged – if you could call the little rippling of her shoulders anything as vulgar as a shrug.

‘What I felt didn't matter. Some people make too much fuss about their feelings. The important thing was what was to be done about it – or rather, not done.'

‘Not leave him, you mean?'

Divorce was difficult, even for the moneyed classes. The already precarious finances of the Venns would be pulled apart by it, Carol's workshop and her dreams for a village of craftsmen put aside for a lonely room somewhere. A lot of women I knew were forced to make those sorts of bargains.

She shook her head. ‘Daniel not finding out.'

‘But if he was going to marry her, didn't he have a right?'

‘Right? A virgin bride, is that what you mean?'

‘No. Trust between him and Felicia.'

‘And no trust ever again between him and Adam? I know they've quarrelled now but that's only politics. It doesn't matter. Daniel will stop thinking he's a revolutionary and settle down.'

‘And never know?'

‘You don't understand how close they are, deep down. Daniel was only four when their parents got killed. Adam was father and elder brother to him in one. I don't want Daniel to lose all that over bedroom business.'

The last two words came out almost explosively.

‘And what about Felicia?'

‘Oh, don't worry about Felicia. She's tougher than you think. You know the kind of perfectly ordinary woman who comes through earthquakes with a child or a puppy in her arms and not a hair out of place? Felicia will be one of those.'

A touch of contempt in her voice, but I couldn't help smiling at the picture. She smiled too.

‘But seriously, you're not going to tell Daniel, are you?'

‘No. Felicia told me in confidence.'

‘Thank you.'

He'd know some time though, I thought. Not many secrets last a lifetime. She knelt down again and made a small adjustment to a swan's eye.

‘Are you still looking for Daisy's uncle?'

‘Yes. I'm hoping Janie might be able to tell me something when they get back tomorrow.'

‘Why Janie?'

‘Something scared her. It may be nothing to do with him, but if I'm right he was actually inside the workshop helping to move that cabinet the day she ran away.'

‘You may be right. I expect you're usually right. Are you?'

A touch of bitterness in her voice. She didn't look at me.

‘Very far from it,' I said.

When I looked back from the door she was still staring at the firescreen. Such a nice civilised family, with so very much to hide. They'd all of them – Oliver, Adam, Carol, even Daniel – behaved as if the survival of the Venns mattered enough to the world to justify financial deceit and lying. And yet it was all coming apart in any case. The Birmingham brewer would enjoy the beautiful rooms and tidy up the garden, the lawyers would pick through the financial wreckage and any money that was left afterwards might go to Philomena's good causes. Mr Sutton would be back fitting precisely similar pieces of wood to lines and lines of precisely similar railway carriages. Daisy's body would rot in some unvisited grave in a remote Wiltshire churchyard. And Felicia, if Carol was right, would walk out of the earthquake with a puppy or a baby in her arms. I doubted it.

*   *   *

I went back to Mrs Penny's for tea and some one-sided gossip on the woodworker's runaway wife. Naturally the news that he'd gone to fetch her back was all round the village and since he'd been seen in my company she knew I had something to do with it but I didn't enlighten her. It was a sore point too that I'd spent a night away without warning her. When she realised she was getting nowhere, she changed tack.

‘Did your friend find you?'

‘What friend?'

‘Girl on a horse. She was round here this morning looking for you. I said you hadn't come home all night and goodness knows where you were.'

‘Did she leave a message?'

‘Something about seeing somebody and then losing him but not to worry because she'd find him again and let you know.'

I felt like howling with frustration. For once Bobbie had done exactly as instructed and brought word to me, only I hadn't been there so I'd no idea what she'd take it into her head to do now.

‘Did she say when she'd be coming back?'

‘No. She wanted to know when you'd be here. I said you hadn't been back yesterday so there was no telling if you'd be back today.'

‘Did she say where she was going next?'

‘I didn't ask her. I had an apple pie in the oven and the crust was burnt black as it was from talking to her. I didn't see the going of her.'

When I'd finished my tea I waited impatiently in my room under the thatch, listening for hooves in the street, cursing myself for not finding out exactly where Bobbie's friends lived. By the time it was getting dusk with no sign of her I knew she wouldn't be coming back that day. All I could hope was that if she was really on the track of Fardel she'd remember my orders not to approach him, but taking orders didn't seem to be one of her talents.

With no news from Bobbie, and Janie still presumably in Swindon, all I could do was go on with my own hunt for Fardel. Experience so far suggested that there wasn't a lot to be gained from wandering the countryside at random. I tried instead to look for a pattern in what I knew – a few shillings earned moving a piece of furniture, the fight outside the Crown, the chicken stolen and cooked, the rabbit eaten raw from the snare. For all I knew, they might involve four separate people. But if I stuck to my hunch that they all involved Fardel, he must have a hiding place in or near the village. If so, he'd been there for over a week. If it were simply a barn or an outhouse, somebody would have come across him by now and turfed him out. Even Constable Johnson might have heard about it.

While I thought about it, I got out my cycle lamp to put in a new battery I'd bought in Swindon. That made me think of the village shop and the woman behind the counter explaining the way shopping was organised in the village. If you wanted anything not stocked in the shop you had to ask Mr Bestley to bring it for you from town, Tuesdays and Fridays, and if the carter happened to be laid up with a bad foot you didn't get it at all. For more than a week the carter hadn't been able to move so neither had his cart. It was a long shot, but worth trying before going back to blundering around footpaths in the dark.

I went downstairs and let myself out, passed the lamplit windows and cheerful men's voices at the Crown and went down the dark and deserted main street. There was nobody at the forge, just the glow of the smith's fire dying down and the lingering smell of singed horse hoof from a day of shoeing. In the carter's yard one window of his cottage glowed faintly but the door was tight shut. He'd be inside there with his sore foot and his old deaf dog, neither of them in any state to be curious about what was happening outside I took out my bicycle lamp and shone it round the yard on weeds and pieces of rusting agricultural machinery. The wagon in the lean-to with its domed top looming out of the darkness seemed almost as big as the cottage itself. I went closer, stumbled and almost fell over one of its downward angled shafts and the thing gave a creak and shudder.

‘Grrrm.'

The sound that came from inside was just recognisable as human, but had too the quality of a large animal half awake, perhaps a bear hibernating, and protesting at being disturbed. I froze, then switched off the lamp and took a few steps back from the shafts. Whether the thumping of my heart was fear or triumph I didn't know. I'd wanted him and I'd found him, but now I had found him I was scared. It was the figure from all our nightmares in there and – for some minutes of panic – it wasn't enough to say that it was human after all, could be faced like any other part of humanity. The carter's cottage was only a few steps away, the blacksmith's house a short run down the track. I could have made for either of them – the blacksmith's probably, because the carter wouldn't be much help – and yet in nightmares if you run away from things they only follow you. Perhaps it was the dread of being followed that kept me there in the dark, listening.

After that first sound there was silence for a while. Then a creaking sound as the body of the cart shifted on its axles. Somebody was moving around inside, slow and heavy-footed. At first I thought he might be coming out to see what had disturbed him, but the movements weren't abrupt enough for that, more like somebody waking up, slowly getting his bearings. It wasn't stupid, whatever was inside there. Needing a roof over its head it had found somewhere better than bushes or a ruined barn – comfortable and convenient for the village and unexpectedly available. It knew how to seize chances, to find the little unregarded niche –
one little window where Long Lankin crept in.
If it settled down and went back to sleep, I'd go away and bring the village policeman here to earn his living. But the noises didn't settle down. There were grunting sounds then heavy footsteps on the wooden boards of the cart. He'd got his boots on. He was coming out. The question was, which way? Out at the front over the driver's seat or the back? If he came out at the back and turned left he'd find me; right, and I'd be screened by the wagon.

He came out of the front. One moment there was just the shape of the driver's platform, then it changed as if some dark fungus had suddenly sprouted from it, a man's head and shoulders. The wagon rocked as he scrambled down. I could hear his breathing now, laboured and resentful as if waking up had taken more energy than he could spare. For a while he just stood, then there was a long pattering on to the weeds, a deeper sigh of unburdening. A relief for me too. If he'd just come out for that purpose he might go back inside without looking round to see what had woken him. But after a while that was probably taken up by rebuttoning he gave another sigh and moved away from the wagon. Three steps would have brought him to where I was standing.

I froze, not breathing. He went in the other direction, towards the forge and the street. For a moment he showed as a silhouette against the red glow from the forge embers, a broad-shouldered man, shoulders a little bent, head thrusting forwards. He walked slowly and surprisingly lightly. Then he moved out of the light and merged into darkness where the track met the street. I guessed he'd gone out to find his food, another chicken from its roosting pole or rabbit from a snare. It wasn't part of my plan to follow him. Now I'd found out where he lived I'd done my part and it was up to the law to do the rest. If nothing else, Fardel had a stolen chicken to account for. But that would mean, perhaps, a night in a police cell and a five-shilling fine – a long way from facing questioning for suspected murder. If, as I was certain now, the man proved to be Daisy's uncle that should be enough to get Inspector Bull's interest, especially as he'd handled the black oak cabinet, been inside the Venns' house. But that still didn't prove murder and the inspector was a sceptical man, especially of any attempt to draw suspicion away from the Venns.