Dead Man Riding (30 page)

‘Compliment? I don't understand a word you're saying. He never killed anybody. Nobody killed anybody.'

‘The Old Man didn't do that to himself. He couldn't have.'

‘He could do anything once he'd set his mind to it. Nearly anything.'

She stared down at the carrot then up at me, as if she couldn't make sense of either of us any more.

‘You going to talk to the lawyers about this?'

‘No, but on one condition.'

I was surprised at my own brutality. I'd no intention of saying anything to any lawyer but was ready to use the threat of it, desperate that my idea of Arthur Mawbray should become reality.

‘What's that?'

‘I want to talk to Arthur Mawbray.'

‘I don't know where he is.'

‘No, but you know where he'll be on Saturday, that's tomorrow. The usual place, he says in his note. He was here last Saturday too, wasn't he, when the dogs were barking?'

‘Yes.'

‘Take me with you when you go to meet him. I promise not to say anything to anybody else until I've talked to him.'

She sat with her hands on the table. They were neat pink hands with shiny little fingernails like sea shells, amazingly unroughened by her hard work. I felt touched by them, almost ashamed of myself.

‘All right. Tomorrow night, when it's getting dark. But he never killed anybody. He'll tell you himself.'

It was rabbit stew again for dinner, with plenty of carrots. Dulcie behaved just as she always did, apart from not looking at me.

*   *   *

Not much happened on the Saturday. It was thundery, headachy weather and Imogen, Midge and I spent some of it attending to our clothes, washing blouses and underthings in buckets in the yard with cold water and hard soap, then rigging up our own washing line to dry them. Usually this would have been a splashy, girlish time with gigglings and harmless banter. Now Imogen and I were treating each other with careful politeness and Midge hardly said a word. I noticed her glancing up to the fells now and again and guessed she was thinking about Nathan. When we needed to borrow soap or clothes pegs from the kitchen I let Midge do it. I was in no hurry to face Dulcie again before the rendezvous in the evening. I'd told nobody about that, not even Meredith. I'd been tempted, but I'd made a promise to Dulcie. Besides, he might have turned anxious and protective and that was the last thing I wanted from him. When we met going about the yard or at mealtimes we behaved normally to each other I think. Or perhaps we didn't. It was like one of those terrible opening scenes in an amateur drama when the producer appeals to the bit-part players, ‘Just behave normally', so of course they do anything but.

It was a relief when the evening meal was over – cold ham, hot potatoes and cabbage – and everybody went their various ways, Alan and Robin to see to the horses, Imogen and Midge to the loft with armfuls of dried clothes, Meredith and Kit strolling up the drive in the last of the sun. I offered to help Dulcie with the clearing up as an excuse to stay with her in the kitchen when everybody else left. We worked in silence, she swirling plates and cups in a bowl of greyish water, I stacking them on a rickety wooden rack to dry. The light went from the kitchen early because of the walls round the yard so it was dusk by the time we'd finished but we didn't bother to light the lamps. She dunked the last cup, emptied out the water and dried her hands on the whitish apron she was wearing.

‘Are we ready then?'

I nodded. She took off the apron and arranged it over the back of a chair to dry.

‘Have a look and see if anybody's around.'

I looked out into the yard and up the drive and came back to report that nobody was about. Dulcie licked her lips and smoothed a hand over her hair. She was nervous, Dulcie of the creamy calm.

‘Better be going, then.'

Outside it was still more light than dark, with some clouds in the west. We went quickly through the arch into the stable yard, across it to the gateway on the far side. It creaked when we opened it and Dulcie caught her breath, but nobody came.

She said, ‘He won't like me bringing you.'

‘Tell him you had no choice.'

We went side by side down a little track to the paddock at the back of the house where the two cows grazed. They raised their heads and ambled up to Dulcie. She pushed them gently away. We walked on across the paddock, Dulcie looking over her shoulder sometimes. As we got near an unkempt hedge on the far side a dark figure came out from under the trees.

‘I'll tell him first,' Dulcie said and broke into a run, stumbling on the cow-trampled earth. I kept striding close behind her, not wanting to give them time to work out a plan of action. I heard her say. ‘There's somebody with me. She's one of the people staying. She made me bring her.'

‘Hello Mr Mawbray,' I said. ‘My name's Nell Bray. I picked up the note you dropped the other night.'

My voice sounded a lot more confident than I felt. He made a sound something between a snort and a nervous giggle and took a step towards me. Even in the half-light his hair was as yellow as straw. It wasn't a bad-looking face, a little weak about the chin and the eyes narrow, though that might have been with the effort of getting a good look at the stranger in the dusk. The broad forehead was very like his father's.

‘Moy name ain't Mawbray. Oi'm Diggory, Dick Diggory. What be you wanting with me?' The rustic accent wouldn't have fooled a baby.

‘If you go on trying to talk like that, you'll get very tired of it. I know you're Arthur Mawbray because Dulcie told me. I'd guessed in any case.'

‘Oh.'

The look he gave Dulcie was bewildered rather than reproachful. He was off balance and I had to keep it that way.

‘I told Dulcie I had to speak to you because you're both in very serious trouble. It's up to you what you do about it, but people have guessed and you haven't got much time.'

I said ‘people' because I wasn't fool enough to let him know that I was the only one. My idea was that they'd probably run away together and I shouldn't try to stop them. It wasn't a carefully worked out ethical position, just revulsion at the idea of Dulcie's pink hands with their sea-shell nails being strapped behind her one morning in a cold shed after a walk across a prison yard.

‘It was a joke. We didn't mean any harm.' He looked about my own age but he sounded like a schoolboy.

‘Joke!'

‘Well, he had tried to kill us, after all. He deserved worrying a bit. Anyway, we wouldn't have let them hang him or anything. If the police had arrested him Dulcie would have got word to me and I'd have popped up right as ninepence, wouldn't I, Dulcie?'

‘So all the time he thought he'd killed you, you were hiding?'

‘Yes. When he started letting off that bloody … excuse me, that shotgun in the dark, me and my mates naturally hit the deck. We crawled away and somebody said it would have served the old b … the Old Man right if he really had killed somebody. Well, I knew I'd be in a bit of trouble with my father anyway if it all got out so I thought I'd make myself scarce and my mates put the word round that he'd shot me. We didn't mean any harm by it.'

‘And you didn't mean any harm deceiving him about Dulcie and the baby?'

A long silence. He'd been standing his ground up to then and sounding confident. Now he took a step back into the shadows and his voice went hurt and gruff.

‘Why did you want to tell her about that, Dulcie?'

‘She didn't need to,' I said. ‘The gossip's all round the town. I suppose the idea was once the Old Man was dead and the baby born, you'd share the money.'

‘It'd be the baby's money, wouldn't it?'

‘So you knew about it, then?'

‘He told Dulcie what he'd put in his will, and she told me.'

‘Because it was your baby?'

Another silence then, ‘Yes.'

‘But you were quite prepared to let him think it was his?'

Dulcie said, ‘He was that pleased about it. His merry-begot, he called it.'

‘Merry-begot?'

‘That's what we say round here for the wrong side of the sheets. He was as happy as when one of his mares falls pregnant. And we'd been sleeping in the big bed together and … and cuddling up and he was a lish enough man considering his age so…'

The picture came into my mind of Dulcie and the Old Man in the big four-poster.

‘Then he started getting anonymous letters saying the baby was somebody else's. Did he discuss them with you?'

‘No, he didn't.'

‘But you could tell he was having doubts. Even I could tell that.'

‘The day with the mare?'

‘Yes. So you and Mr Mawbray decided you had to do something about it before he found out the truth?'

‘It wouldn't have mattered once he'd acknowledged it,' Arthur Mawbray said. ‘Once he'd held it in his arms and acknowledged it, it would have been his. That's the law.'

And he a magistrate's son. Yet he'd brought out this piece of rural primitivism with what sounded like total conviction.

Dulcie backed him up. ‘Arthur was away anyway. It was just a case of him staying away a few months more until the child was born and the Old Man had got him in his arms and everything would have been all right.'

‘You weren't far away, were you Mr Mawbray? You were seeing Dulcie regularly.'

‘Not regularly, just sometimes.'

‘Often enough to come up with a plan at any rate. Once he started thinking the child might not be his you had to do something quickly before he changed his will. Dulcie knew the Old Man was walking round outside most nights, guarding his horses…'

‘We never meant any harm to the horses!'

‘… so while she was keeping an eye on him it would be an easy enough matter for you to catch the horse and get his tack. It must have been you I heard down in the tack room. I think you waited with the horse just on the far side of the gate to your father's land. He'd see the horse, come through to take it back, then you hit him on the head and tied him into the saddle. Whether he was already dead by then…'

While I'd been talking, he was trying to stop me, inarticulate sounds at first then ‘no' repeated louder and louder. Now his hand closed round my arm in a crushing grip and started pumping it up and down.

‘No, no, no. What are you talking about? You're mad.'

Dulcie called to him to stop, but he got his other hand on my shoulder and twisted me round so that he was shouting into my face.

‘You're calling me a murderer? You're saying I did that to him?'

‘Yes, and the police know it too.'

Not true, but all I could think of to protect myself. As the shock of it hit him his grip went slack and I managed to pull away from him. I took a few steps back, expecting him to come at me again, but he suddenly sank down into a sitting position on the ground, head on his knees and arms clasped round them, rocking backwards and forwards, keening ‘no, no, no'. His collapse horrified me more than the attack. Surely this wasn't the way murderers were supposed to behave.

Dulcie moved first. She came forward and put both hands on his shoulders, staring at me over his bent head.

‘If the police think they know it, they're wrong. He couldn't have done it. He wasn't here.'

If she'd sounded angry it would have been less convincing. She just stated it as a fact, her fingers kneading the sides of his neck like a mother with a fretful child. Arthur stopped keening but his head stayed bent.

‘He'll tell you himself in a while. You can't expect him to be thinking straight after what you said to him.'

After a few minutes he got himself clumsily upright but stayed in contact with her, arm against arm.

‘I didn't even know it had happened until two days afterwards.' He sounded sulky now rather than fearful. ‘I got back here and met Dulcie by the gate as usual and she told me.'

‘Where had you been?'

‘Out in the boat.'

‘What boat?'

‘The
Eastern Light
, fishing boat out of Maryport.'

‘What were you doing there?'

He stared. ‘Fishing.'

Dulcie explained, ‘It's what he likes doing, only his father won't let him.'

‘He wanted me to go into the army like he did. I wouldn't have minded the fighting but then there was all the rest of it, shouting orders and standing in line and so on. I ran away once, only he brought me back. He said he'd disinherit me. Never mind the inheritance, I told him, just set me up with a nice little fishing boat and I won't bother you again. That was fair enough, wasn't it?'

He looked at me as if the answer to that was as important as whether he'd killed a man or not. Now I'd got him, I felt a deep disappointment in him. The belief that young Mawbray was still alive had created a picture of him in my mind: ruthless, intelligent and sinister. One thing I could certainly rule out now was intelligence. Stupidity is one of the most difficult things for a clever person to act convincingly and every tone of his voice and movement of his body told me I was face to face with the real thing. But stupidity can be dangerous too.

‘So you needed money?'

‘Doesn't everybody?'

‘Enough to kill for it?'

‘I expect a lot of people would if they thought they could get away with it. Only I didn't. I've told you, I wasn't here.'

‘Maryport isn't far away.'

He stared, ‘Do you know anything about tides?'

‘Only that they go in and out.'

‘You ever tried to row a boat in from a long way out at sea against the tide?'

‘No.'

‘Well, take it from me it's true what Dulcie told you. What day of the week did the Old Man die?'

I told him it was the night of Thursday the twelfth. He wrinkled his broad forehead, working it out.