Murder in the Afternoon (2 page)

A woman, wearing cape and hood, stood in the shadow of the porch.

‘Mrs Shackleton?’ Her voice was slightly breathless, as though she were nervous or had been hurrying.

What sort of mad woman rushes out in the middle of the night and runs through the streets in the pouring rain?

‘Yes. I’m Mrs Shackleton.’

‘I must to talk to you.’

When I did not straightaway open the door wider, she added, ‘My husband’s gone missing.’

I felt groggy with tiredness. ‘You best go to the police.’

They would have detectives on night duty.

Her snort, part laugh, part groan, dismissed my suggestion before she spoke. ‘The police? I’ve tried. They’re neither use nor ornament.’

She seemed unaware of the time and offered no apology for disturbing me. A north wind howled down the street, driving horizontal bullets of rain.

Imagining that a person intent on foul play would not hammer the door knocker loudly enough to wake half of Headingley, I fumbled to undo the latch chain. As the light from the hall fell on her face, she looked very young, and pale as the moon.

Without waiting for an invitation, the woman stepped inside, dripping rain onto the mat.

I shut the door behind her. ‘Let me take your cape.’

She unhooked and shook off a dark plaid cape, creating a pool of water on the polished wood floor.

‘Thank you.’ Her lips were pale but two unnaturally bright spots of pink lit her cheeks. Perhaps she suffered from consumption. The pulses in her throat throbbed. ‘I left my umbrella on the train. I caught the milk train. I’ve run from Headingley station.’

I hung the cape on the newel post, again stubbing my toe on the suitcase.

‘You’d better come through, Mrs …’

‘Armstrong. Mary Jane Armstrong.’

The dining room doubles as my office but no fire had been lit in there for a week, since before I left for London. I led her through to the kitchen. ‘This way. The fire will be out, but we’ll be warmer in here.’ She followed me. I handed her a towel. ‘Dry yourself a little.’ She moved like someone who had walked out of the sea and would shortly return to Neptune.

‘I don’t care about being wet.’ But she rubbed at her hair which fell in damp wavy strands below her ears. Her hooded cape had provided little protection from the deluge.

She was in her mid or late thirties, about five foot four, plump and pretty with clear white skin and abundant hazelnut-brown hair, swept up and caught with tortoiseshell combs and pins. It looked as though it may have started out neat but now wavy tendrils escaped the combs. Strands of hair hung below her shoulders where the pins had fallen out. She wore a calf-length bottle-green skirt and white blouse, with a locket at her throat. Her shoes were so well polished that the rain slid off the leather.

I drew out a chair, leaving her to recover for a moment, while I went into the dining room.

Who was she, and what brought her here at this hour? Something about her seemed so very familiar. She reminded me of someone, and I couldn’t think who.

I lifted the decanter from the sideboard, along with a brandy balloon. At the kitchen table, I poured brandy into the glass. ‘Here. Drink this. You look as if you need it, and then you can tell me what brings you here.’

She cupped the glass in both hands and stared intently
into it, as if the amber liquor created a crystal ball and the future would become startlingly clear. Then she looked at me from eyes that were the same hazelnut brown as her hair. There was intensity in her gaze, as though what she did not find in the brandy balloon, she would see in my eyes.

Where did I know her from?

The impression fled as she screwed up her eyes tightly, sniffed at the brandy, and knocked it back in one quick gulp. She coughed and began to choke, saying between splutters, ‘Eh, I thought it were ginger ale. What is it? Right burns my throat.’

‘Brandy. It’s brandy.’

‘You should’ve said. I’ll have another and take it more steady.’

I lifted the decanter and poured another finger of brandy. ‘Sip it. Gently does it.’ I had come back from London feeling a little tired, but now the tiredness fled. I said encouragingly, ‘You’d better tell me what brings you here.’

She squeezed the glass so tightly it was in danger of cracking. ‘Like I said, my husband’s gone missing.’ Mrs Armstrong spoke in a flat, tired voice. ‘I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. I thought of you because … well, I’ve heard that you find people.’ She took another sip of brandy, and then lost interest and pushed the glass away.

‘What’s your husband’s name?’

‘Ethan. Ethan Armstrong.’ She joined her hands and drew them close to her body, running the ball of her thumb across her fingertips, her only sign of agitation, and yet there was something so palpable in that agitation that it started butterflies fluttering in my stomach.

She tilted her head slightly to one side. ‘I’d have known you anywhere.’

‘Oh? We’ve met before?’

She gave a smile, and shook her head. ‘Not met, not exactly.’

Perhaps she was a mad woman after all. My housekeeper has the flat adjoining the house. All I had to do was ring the bell. Emergency signal.

Calm down, I told myself. The woman’s distressed. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You wouldn’t remember.’

There is nothing more annoying than a person who will not spit out simple information. I have a good memory for faces, and there was something familiar about her, yet I could not place her. ‘Was it during the war?’

‘Something like that. Long ago, anyway.’ She made a dismissive gesture, as if where and when our paths had crossed was of no importance.

‘Have you come far?’

‘From Great Applewick.’

I shook my head. ‘Can’t say I know the place.’

‘No one does. There’s not enough to it. It’s near Guiseley.’

‘Ah yes.’ I pictured my journeys to Guiseley during the war, a small town, not much more than a mile wide, with a main street and a town hall that was given over as a hospital. ‘The hospital, is that where we met?’

She looked at her hands. ‘It could have been. Yes, that was it.’

People give themselves away in all sorts of small ways when lying. She changed the subject. ‘Can I have a glass of water?’

I moved my chair, but she was already on her feet, at
the sink, her back to me, turning on the tap, running water into a cup.

What a cheek the woman had, talking her way in, hinting that she knew me, and now making herself at home. But perhaps her story was so terrible that she would have to work up to it slowly.

Holding the cup in both hands, she took a sip. ‘I wish we had running water in our house. I’m to think myself lucky we have a well in the garden.’

Note to self: the first thing Mrs Armstrong mentioned was a well. A complaint about her living conditions, or an important clue? Perhaps she murdered her husband and dumped him in the well. How long would this take, I wondered, and what should I do with her at the end of it? ‘So, Mrs Armstrong …’

‘I don’t like you to call me Mrs Armstrong. I’m Mary Jane.’

‘Very well.’ If she expected me to tell her to call me Kate, she could think again. ‘Let me take some particulars, Mary Jane.’

At the top of the page, I wrote.

Mary Jane Armstrong – Monday, 14 May, 1923: 4.30 a.m.

Missing: Ethan Armstrong, husband
.

‘And your address?’

‘Mason’s Cottage on Nether End in Great Applewick.’

‘Tell me when you last saw Ethan.’

‘He went to work on Saturday, as usual. Ethan’s a stone mason. Works at Ledger’s quarry. Finishing time is one o’clock but he stayed on alone to get on with a special job. He’s all for better working hours for quarrymen, and yet he’s the one chooses to stay on when everyone else has knocked off.’

‘So he went to work on Saturday morning at about …’

‘They start at eight on Saturday, seven during the week. The children took him a bite to eat at five o’clock in the evening. I would have let him go hungry, till his belly brought him home.’ She closed her eyes and for a moment her breathing came in short bursts. Her chest rose and fell. She took very deliberate deep breaths, and then paused, as though she would take a running jump at what she needed to say. I waited for her to continue.

‘Harriet – she’s my daughter – she says he was out cold, lying in his hut. He didn’t stir when she touched him. She felt sure he was dead. Instead of coming straight home to me, she took it into her head to go to the farm, it being nearest, but having her little brother slowed her down. One of the men went back with her.’ Her eyes widened and she jutted her chin, as though expecting contradiction of what she would say next. ‘There was no sign of Ethan. The quarry was deserted. Arthur walked her to the road and sent her home. Then he went back to the farm for Austin, carried the little feller home on his shoulders.’

‘What age are the children?’ I wondered whether Austin would corroborate Harriet’s story.

‘Harriet’s ten, Austin is six.’

‘Did Austin see his father?’

She shook her head. ‘Harriet said she kept him back, kept him out of it.’ Mary Jane placed her hands on the table as though they no longer belonged to her. ‘I hurried down to the quarry as soon as Harriet told me. Ethan was nowhere to be found. We haven’t seen him since. I’m running mad with worry.’

‘Could Harriet have been mistaken?’

‘That’s what I hope and pray. But I believe her. She’s a truthful child and nobody’s fool. Sergeant Sharp, he’s our village bobby, he didn’t believe her. Made that quite
plain. Said a dead man doesn’t stand up and walk. But give the sergeant his due, he pressed half a dozen quarrymen from the Fleece to search the quarry with lanterns, because by then it had come in dark. They were glad to do it, or some were. Ethan’s a man people love or loathe.’

At least she spoke of him in the present tense. Perhaps he wasn’t at the bottom of the well, unless dumped there by one of the people who loathed him.

‘Do you have a photograph?’

She took an envelope from her skirt pocket. It contained a photograph which she slid across the table. Ethan Armstrong gazed at me: broad faced, clean shaven, and with a solemn expression. He was wearing uniform and an infantry cap badge.

‘That was taken in 1917, so it’s six years old but the best I’ve got.’

‘What height and build is he?’

‘He’s five foot nine inches, with sandy coloured hair, well built, a strong fellow. He has to be in his line of work.’

‘His age?’

‘He’s thirty-six, same as me.’

‘Still clean shaven?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you leave things with Sergeant Sharp, after the search of the quarry?’

I wondered whether he may have circulated a description to the local hospitals.

‘He was fed up with me, especially when I told him we’d had a bit of a fall out that morning. He thinks Ethan has taken the hump and left me, and that Harriet is a little liar who seeks attention.’ Her voice rose, as if she half expected me to take the side of the police sergeant and
dismiss her fears. ‘I haven’t slept. I can’t just leave it like this.’

I would have to tread a fine line. Either Ethan Armstrong had been murdered, or had abandoned his wife. ‘Who are his friends? Is there anyone he would have confided in, or gone to visit?’

After ten minutes I had established who loved Ethan: his good friend Bob Conroy whose farm Harriet hurried to; Ethan’s former apprentice, Raymond, now a mason in his own right; fellow trade unionists in the Quarrymen’s Union, and radicals across the North of England who agitated for better pay and conditions for working men. That didn’t exactly narrow the field.

Those who loathed him included the quarry foreman, who had defeated Ethan in his bid to call a strike last week.

‘Mary Jane, you say you believe Harriet when she describes finding her father’s body, even if the sergeant doesn’t?’

Her sigh came from somewhere deep. ‘I do, or I did. But now I begin to think she must have been mistaken. None of the quarrymen gave her credence. I began to think she must have seen some apparition.’ Her voice lifted with hope. ‘Bob thinks so too.’

‘Bob Conroy the farmer?’

‘Yes.’

Yet Bob Conroy had not been there to walk back with Harriet and search the quarry. I made a mental note that I must find out where he was on Saturday afternoon. This “good friend” might well be the Brutus who dealt the blow.

‘Was there any further search yesterday? Did you contact anyone?’

She shook her head. ‘Not a proper search, no. Bob said Ethan would be sure to turn up. He said that some comrades were meeting on Hawksworth Moor, a sort of labour rally.’ The red spots returned to her cheeks as she coloured up with anger. ‘I tell Ethan, we’d be better off if he put his energy into home and hearth. Bob took a stroll out to the moor, but he said he wasn’t made welcome without Ethan, and no one knew where Ethan was.’

‘Has Ethan disappeared before, without explanation?’