The Path of the Wicked (6 page)

‘Before that.'

The mother went on rocking, but her eyes stayed open and on me. Impossible to guess if she knew what was being said. The girl put the basket on the table and started unpacking it, handling the eggs like precious things. When she lifted out the wedge of cheese, a large crumb of it fell off. It was fine-looking cheese, orange as marigold petals. Instinctively, the girl picked up the crumb and put it in her mouth. For just a moment her eyes flashed with pure childish pleasure; then a guilty look came on her face and she glanced at me as if expecting criticism.

‘Why don't you cut yourself a proper slice?' I said.

She wouldn't. Moving carefully round us, she fetched dishes from the dresser, arranged the food on them and shut it away behind the zinc screen of a meat safe in the corner. The old woman stopped rocking. Her eyes were following the girl and the plates.

‘You're both hungry,' I said.

Starving, more like. The meat safe had been as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard.

‘We do all right,' the girl said. I thought the obvious untruth came from pride, until she added, ‘Better than being taken off to the workhouse at any rate.'

She went back to the basket and began sifting through the straw that had protected the eggs. Nothing else there, I thought, until she found a screw of blue paper. She unwrapped it. Two ounces or so of tea, with something gold gleaming in it. A sovereign. Typical of Mr Godwit's cautious kindness. The girl froze with surprise and then looked at me.

‘He must mean you to have it,' I said.

Slowly, her hand went to it. She picked it up and slid it in her pocket.

‘What's that, Sal?'

The old woman, speaking for the first time, her voice grating like flint on slate. She'd sensed something.

‘Tea, Ma. He's sent tea.'

A grunt that might have been satisfaction; then the rocking resumed. The girl gave me the empty basket. I handed it to Tabby.

‘Thank him,' she said. ‘Thank him from Ma.'

She came with us, round the side of the cottage and back to the road.

‘I heard your father's dead,' I said.

‘Long time ago.'

‘And Colonel Kemble had been paying a pension to your mother?'

An intrusive question, the sort the workhouse board of guardians would ask people. She answered reluctantly, eyes lowered.

‘Shilling a week, it was. Only he stopped it, with all the trouble.'

‘Trouble? Because your brother had been in the riots or because of the rick burning?'

A long silence, then: ‘Everything.'

‘When did Colonel Kemble stop the pension?'

‘Last back-end.'

‘So you've had nothing to live on since last autumn? Have you seen your brother in all that time?'

‘Sometimes.'

‘Recently? I mean, near the time when he was arrested.'

‘No.'

She had her arms crossed on her chest and was looking down. I thought she might be lying, but I couldn't bully her.

‘Does your brother have any particular friends?'

‘Friends?'

Her head came up, alarmed.

‘Just somebody who liked him, somebody I could talk to about him?'

She thought about it. ‘There was Will Smithies.'

‘Is he in the village?'

‘He works at the wheelwright's.'

A small enough scrap, but all we were likely to get. I tried a last question.

‘Do you think your brother killed Miss Marsh?'

She looked me in the face.

‘He couldn't kill a chicken. When we kept chickens, it was me had to wring their necks.'

I said goodbye. She turned back towards the cottage and we started walking along the road. Then there were footsteps running behind us.

‘Miss.'

The girl, Sal. We waited until she came up to us, breathless.

‘Miss, can you tell me something?'

‘If I can.'

‘When are they going to hang him?'

I'd expected some question about food or money. This staggered me.

‘He's not even been found guilty yet. He won't be tried till the assizes.'

‘So when after that?'

There was a world of sorrow in her voice, all the worse for being so trodden-down that she hadn't let it show till now. The settled hopelessness of it was worse than fear or anger.

‘He may not be hanged,' I said.

But she only shook her head, not believing me. It would have been cruelty to raise her hopes by talking about inquiries and evidence.

‘I'd like to see him before they do,' she said. ‘Will they let me see him?'

I think I said yes, I thought they would, accepting her hopelessness. Whatever I said, it seemed to give her some bleak comfort because she thanked me and went back towards the cottage. Tabby and I walked on.

‘I want you to go there every day,' I said. ‘Walk past slowly and make sure Sal sees you. Get her to talk to you if you can – not about the murder, just anything.'

‘All right. I'm getting used to the way they talk here.'

To a born and bred Londoner like Tabby, a Gloucestershire accent was practically a foreign language, but she had a quick ear and even quicker understanding.

‘You think she knows more about her brother's friends than she lets on?'

‘Sure of it,' I said. ‘You saw how she looked. I think he'd have impressed on her that she wasn't to talk to anybody about them.'

‘Except Will Smithies.'

‘Yes. I think she gave us that name because Smithies is nothing to do with the Raddlebush Brotherhood. Still, it will be useful to speak to him.'

Above all, I wanted to build up a picture of Jack Picton. All I knew so far was that he was probably a rioter, almost certainly a rick burner, not especially kind to his old mother and . . .

‘It's the way they look at you,' Tabby said.

‘What look at you?'

‘Chickens, when you're killing them. They turn their heads round and there's those little round eyes staring straight at you.'

I tried to put the picture out of my head.

‘Sal thinks if he couldn't kill a chicken, he couldn't kill a woman,' I said. ‘Do you think that follows?'

‘Nah. Course not.'

The way she said it put the matter beyond argument, but I agreed with her in any case. We walked most of the rest of the way in silence. One of the things that puzzled me was how the mother and daughter had come to be so close to starvation. In country areas, when people fell on hard times, there was usually enough kindness among neighbours to send round a few pounds of potatoes or the remains of a pie. It looked as if the village had deliberately turned its back on the Pictons, long before the murder. Was that entirely because of the son's activities? A smaller puzzle was that Mr Godwit, in his first consultation with me, had said the widow had been left with three children, yet there was only Sal at home. Presumably, the third child had either moved away or died and Sal was having to cope on her own.

‘So, are we going to help her?' Tabby said, as we went in at the orchard gate.

‘I'm sure I can get Mr Godwit to send more food. It will be a good excuse for you to see her again,' I said.

That hadn't been what she meant and she knew I was avoiding the real question, but had the sense not to press it. Not for now, at any rate.

M
r Godwit agreed that Tabby should carry food to the Pictons every other day, but his attitude seemed guarded, as if it embarrassed him to be their benefactor. He'd seen the magistrates' clerk and asked him to try to arrange an order for me to visit Jack Picton in prison, though he still disliked the idea. He thought the order might come through the next day or the day after that. By then it was dinner time, as Mr Godwit dined at an unfashionably early country hour, and he was adamant that what he called ‘this unhappy business' should not be discussed at table. Once that was decided, he was an agreeable host. We dined, just the two of us, at a pearwood table overlooking the garden, with late roses twining round the open window. The food was all from his own modest estate or from local farms and streams, and his housekeeper was a talented cook. She gave us trout fillets in watercress sauce, lamb chops with beans, carrots and glazed potatoes, raspberries and cream, accompanied by good claret from Mr Godwit's wine merchant in Cheltenham. He turned out to be a devoted amateur naturalist, with observations on the comings and goings of swifts and swallows, wild orchids, badger setts, as if he knew every flower and creature on his acres. He was the third generation of his family to live there, so he knew the history of everybody in the village back to their grandfathers and was happy to talk about them, as long as we didn't venture on to the big subject.

Once I'd established, with a discreet question or two, that he wasn't conscientiously opposed to horse racing, I told him Amos's story of the two gamblers.

‘Did it really happen like that, or was it grooms' gossip?' I asked.

‘Much as you heard the story. As far as I can gather, at any rate. The whole of Cheltenham has been talking about it since it happened.'

‘Do you know the two men?'

‘I know something of Peter Paley, the one who disappeared. His father, Colum Paley, is very well known round here. The winning man is the younger son of Lord Ivebury. I've met the father – a decent enough man – but not the son.'

‘And young Paley hasn't reappeared?'

‘No. That sighting by the reapers seems to have been the last anybody saw of him.'

‘Or written to let his family know he's still alive?'

‘No.'

‘His father must be dreadfully worried.'

Mr Godwit sipped thoughtfully at his claret. ‘They're a strange family. New money. The word is that the grandfather was a butcher who made his fortune supplying meat to the army in the wars against Napoleon. Bad meat, some people said, though that's probably malicious gossip. Some of the young bloods at assemblies in Cheltenham used to call Colum ‘Stinker Paley' and hold their noses, behind his back. That was until he caught one of them at it and thrashed him senseless on the pavement under the canopy of the assembly room. They're pretty well accepted in the neighbourhood now.'

‘Well enough accepted for his son to run up tens of thousands in debts.'

‘Certainly. Nobody doubts that Paley has sackfuls of money and he's always been generous to young Peter, perhaps too much so. There have been signs that his patience has been wearing thin. He put a notice in the paper quite recently, saying he wouldn't be responsible for his son's debts. When Peter was engaged to Kemble's daughter, I think his father hoped it might make him behave better. It probably did for a while, but then the engagement was broken off and the boy went back to his old gambling ways.'

‘The man who disappeared was engaged to Miss Kemble?'

I was surprised to see the story coming so near home. Mr Godwit looked uneasy at being close to the forbidden subject.

‘The engagement was broken off two years ago. It had nothing to do with young Paley's disappearance.'

‘Did she break it, or did he?'

‘I gather that the young lady did. Or at least her father and brother did it for her. She was only sixteen at the time.'

‘Was it broken because of his reputation?'

‘There'd been a quarrel between Peter Paley and Rodney Kemble. I don't know the cause, but it was clearly a serious one. In the circumstances, the engagement could hardly stand.'

I wondered if that had been young Miss Kemble's opinion, too. Since she was too young to consent to marriage on her own account, she'd have been given no choice in the matter. Mr Godwit was probably right that the broken engagement had nothing to do with young Paley's spectacular disappearance. He didn't sound like the kind of man who'd nurse a broken heart for two years.

‘Has Colum Paley been trying to find his son?' I said.

‘If so, there's not much sign of it. When somebody asked if he'd heard from him, he said the young hound would come home when he was hungry.'

‘You'd have thought he'd be hungry by now.'

‘Yes. It will be three weeks this Saturday.'

He suggested that we should drink our coffee in the summer house on the lawn. As we watched the swallows looping low over the grass to catch flies, I was doing sums in my head.

‘You said it will be three weeks this Saturday since Peter Paley disappeared. Isn't that about the same time that Mary Marsh was killed?'

‘The day after she was found.'

I stared at him. He was still watching the swallows.

‘What? Didn't anybody make a connection?'

He looked at me, seeming genuinely puzzled.

‘A young woman dies and the day afterwards a young man gallops off and hasn't been seen since,' I said. ‘Hasn't anybody suggested the two might be linked?'

‘Why should they have been? Young Paley took up that ridiculous gamble out of the blue. Besides, I don't think there's any real harm in him. He's like a lot of young men these days – not enough brains for the law or morals for the church, so they have to find something to do with themselves.'

‘Did he know Miss Marsh?'

‘I suppose he must have seen her sometimes when he was engaged to Miss Kemble. No more than that.'

We finished our coffee. The swallows went to roost. Mr Godwit asked what I'd like to do tomorrow, as if I really were that remote relative on a pleasure visit.

‘I think I might take a ride on my mare in the morning.' His smile of approval disappeared when I added, ‘And make a call on the wheelwright. You know him?'

‘I know the Smithies, father and son. Decent craftsman; nobody denies it.'

‘But?'

‘Chartists. They make no secret of it, attend meetings and so on.'

‘Is Will Smithies the father or the son?'