The Wild Wood Enquiry (5 page)

MIRIAM BLAKE HANDED over duty in the shop at half past two and set off for home in a very different mood from the elation she felt on leaving her visitor sweetly sleeping this morning. She had not had many customers, leaving her plenty of time to think. How could she have been so silly? She had plans for Gus, and of course she did not want Gus and Katherine to be reunited! No, she would do her very best to prevent it.

She walked swiftly down Hangman’s Lane and up to her front garden gate. There she stopped, frowning. Good heavens, the lazy woman had not even drawn back the curtains. Determined on a different regime designed to get rid
of Katherine as soon as possible, she opened her door and went through to the kitchen. She felt the kettle. It was stone cold, so she was probably still in bed.

“Well, Mrs. Ex-Halfhide,” she muttered to herself, “if you think I’m waiting on you hand and foot, you have another think coming.” She walked through to the foot of the stairs and listened. No sounds coming from the spare room. “Yoo-hoo!” she called. “Time to get up?”

There was no reply, and Miriam sighed. This was going to be more difficult than she had thought. She climbed the stairs, stamping her feet to warn Katherine of her approach and knocked firmly. No answer. With rising anger, Miriam pushed open the door and looked inside. There was nobody there, not in the unused bed or in the small bathroom next door.

Miriam looked carefully around upstairs, including in the cupboards, which made her smile. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself, Katherine’s up and dressed, made her bed, packed her bag and dumped it with Gus and gone out for a walk or something.…

She returned to the kitchen and walked out into the garden. No sign of her. Ah well, she thought, the woman is a townie and probably went out in search of what she insists on calling “air like champagne.” She could have gone anywhere round the village or up through the woods. No food for her, then, Miriam decided, unless she’s back here in the next half hour.

After a solitary snack, eaten with little appetite, Miriam felt she had been taken for a ride by Katherine Halfhide. She had been so friendly last night, telling her all about Gus’s early life when they were married. Some of it she should probably have kept to herself! But now, this morning, there had been no note of explanation, no indication of
where she had gone or when she might return. She had behaved as if Miriam were running a boardinghouse for travelling salesmen. Well, two could play at that game. There would be no cooked tea if she came back hungry. Miriam was off to the Women’s Institute meeting this evening, calling for her friend Rose Budd on the way, and would have a quick sandwich before leaving.

Perhaps she would just nip along to Rose’s cottage at the end of the row and check on what they had to take with them. A demonstrator was booked for this evening, showing members how to make delicious dishes from ingredients collected from the countryside. Nettle soup, thought Miriam with a shudder, and mushroom omelette made with poisonous toadstools and pigeon’s eggs! Still, they had to show willingness. Numbers were dropping from the membership, and Miriam couldn’t bear the thought of Barrington without a WI.

Rose Budd was in her back garden but heard Miriam calling. Her hands were covered in sand from the children’s sand boat, a new trendy toy supposed to be cleaner than the usual sand pit. “Some hopes!” Rose had said to her husband, David. Her two boys were capable of messing up the
Queen Elizabeth
cruise liner, let alone a boat-shaped wooden box with a climbing mast, filled with sand and plastic buckets.

She heard Miriam and sighed. Miriam Blake was years older but a good friend. Rose knew she wasn’t overfond of children but always willing to babysit or stand by if Rose had to rush out on her own. She called out to her to come around the back and watch out for buckets and heaps of sand strewn around the garden.

“What are you taking tonight?” Miriam asked, picking her way over to the sand boat.

“Oh goodness, haven’t thought,” said Rose, pushing her fair hair out of her eyes with sandy hands. “Ouch! Oh blast, have you got a tissue, Miriam,” she said, blinking and shaking her head.

Miriam produced a neatly folded handkerchief with
MB
embroidered in one corner and handed it over. “Poor you,” she said. “I suppose you don’t fancy a walk to pick some whatevers, just to show we care.”

Rose nodded. “Anything to get me away from sand,” she said. “Can you wait a few minutes while I clean up, and then we’ll go up to the woods. Should be something there, if it’s only a half-eaten sandwich left by picnickers.”

“I need to lock up,” Miriam said. “See you in five minutes?”

“Yes, okay. We must be back in time for me to pick up the boys from holiday club.”

Miriam returned to her house, gave a cursory look-around for any signs of a returning Katherine but quickly gave up. She wrote a note to Gus, telling him she assumed he knew where his ex-wife had gone, but in any case, she could no longer put her up as a guest. She collected a basket from her garden shed, locked up and made her way back to meet Rose.

THE WOODS WERE pleasantly cool and shady, with dappled sunlight spreading over grassy patches between the trees. Miriam and Rose walked along chatting, with eyes to the ground for likely looking plants, and both agreed that even if they found nothing useful, it had been a good idea to have a walk. “There’s always something to do in the house,” Miriam said, brushing aside undergrowth in search of young nettle leaves.

“You could spend your whole life cleaning,” agreed Rose. She had picked up a fallen branch and broken it into pieces to have a strong stick for whacking her way through bracken and thorny twigs. “Some people say the curled tips of new bracken are edible,” she said, and then suddenly stopped with a gasp.

“What’s up?” said Miriam.

“Oh my God, look here,” Rose said in a hoarse voice. “What’s that, under the bracken? Look, just there!”

Miriam walked forward gingerly, and peered down. “Ah, I see,” she said calmly. “Looks like a hand, doesn’t it. Perhaps we’d better—”

She got no further but turned back to where Rose swayed, deathly white. Miriam reached her, arms outstretched, and caught her just as she fell.

MIRIAM HAD LOOKED back at the whitish glimpse of the hand but decided the most urgent thing was to help poor Rose back to her own house. She had settled her down in a chair by the window and now busied herself arranging for a friend to pick up and keep the boys until Rose could collect them. This done, she bustled about like the community nurse on a visit.

“I’ll put the kettle on and make you a nice cup of hot sweet tea. That’s for shock. And then I’ll phone the police.”

“Shouldn’t you do that first?” Rose whispered. She could not get out of her mind the sight of that hand, sticking out so pleadingly from the bracken. Miriam wouldn’t touch anything but said they must leave it for the police. She was so calm! Of all people, Rose would not have thought Miriam a heroine in an emergency. She was usually all of a dither at
the slightest thing. But now she was making tea as if a dead body in the wood was an everyday occurrence.

“Now, you drink this,” Miriam said. “And I’ll dial 999. I suppose I should ask for police rather than the ambulance. It’s not as if that woman’s in a hurry.”

“How do you know it was a woman?”

“I don’t, but it’s usually women who get murdered. Hello? Police, please. Well, yes, I suppose you’d say it was urgent. Murder is usually urgent, isn’t it? All right, all right! Keep your hair on. I’m not joking. It’s in the woods up Hangman’s Lane in Barrington.” Miriam gave her name and address and said she would be at home for the rest of the day.

“That’s that, then,” she said tidily, filling up Rose’s cup. “Drink that up, not too quick. There’s plenty of time before you collect the boys.”

“I don’t want them frightened by the police,” Rose said anxiously. “You’d be the best one to show them the, um…”

“Don’t worry, I’ll certainly do that. And anyway, I don’t suppose they’ll be in Farnden all that soon. They obviously thought I was having ’em on. Practical joke, you know.”

In Rose’s imagination, the hand was already being attacked by foxes and carried off to their earth. Ugh! She wished David was not miles away helping with a neighbour’s harvest.

“You’d better go now,” she said. “I’m feeling okay, thanks to you. I mustn’t alarm the boys, though I expect there’ll be police cars and all that quite soon. Thanks for helping me out, Miriam. I’ll be fine now. Bye. Oh, and if you want, you can come up and have supper with us later. Don’t sit there brooding on your own. Bye.”

DETECTIVE INSPECTOR FROBISHER was weary from a long interview with a woman who was clearly guilty of repeated shoplifting but had clever excuses and explanations for each crime. He only half listened to the latest reports coming in but caught the name Barrington and knew immediately that it was somehow significant. Then he remembered. “Enquire Within,” he said aloud.

“Sorry?” said his fresh-faced young assistant.

“Enquire Within,” Frobisher repeated. “An enquiry agency consisting of two ancient pensioners, one jolly divorcée, and a mystery man not long arrived in the village of Barrington. That’s the name I recognised. Barrington, a lovely Suffolk village on our patch, and up until the last case solved by Enquire Within, with no help from the police of course, it was a quiet, law-abiding place, never requiring any attention from us.”

“Ah, yes, now I’ve got it, sir. Barrington. That was the call that came in an hour or so ago. Hoax call, we reckon. Some woman reporting a dead body found in the woods. I blame the telly, sir. Gives people ideas they’d never think up themselves.”

“Speaking from long experience, are you, Paddy?” Frobisher said blandly. “So who’s gone to investigate?”

Paddy was embarrassed. “We sort of hoped you’d look in on your way home. Not far from your village, is it, sir? I’ll give you the woman’s address.” He checked his watch. It was past his off-duty time, and he had planned to meet his girlfriend after work.

“Right. Get us a car, then, and we’ll be on our way.”

“Um, sir.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing, sir. Ready when you are.”

MIRIAM WAS IN her kitchen, sitting at the small, scrubbed table, cleaning odd pieces of silver her mother had collected over a lifetime of service at Barrington Hall. She heard the rat-tat-tat at the front door and knew at once it would be the police.

“Good afternoon, madam,” Inspector Frobisher said. The woman looked familiar, and he was sure she had figured largely in that Enquire Within case. “I understand you reported finding what purported to be a dead body in the woods at the end of this lane?”

“It didn’t purport anything,” Miriam said. “It was past purporting. And it wasn’t a body, it was a hand, as I reported. I could see where it ended. And it was dead.” She had decided not to mention Rose at this point. After all, there was no need to involve her in these early stages. Miriam would not have admitted it, but she was enjoying herself, feeling important in the eyes of the police. It was heady stuff. No doubt Rose would have to be questioned, but that could be later.

“Very well,” said Frobisher, taking a deep breath. “Would you be kind enough to accompany us to the exact spot where you found this, um, hand?”

“I’ll just lock up,” said Miriam. “You can’t be too careful these days, Inspector.”

Frobisher wished he could say that if her story was true, then that was a statement of the obvious. But he nodded politely and said he would wait by the gate.

In no time, Miriam reappeared and led the way to the
woods. “It was just along here,” she said, a hundred yards into the trees. “I remember where it was exactly, because I was looking for the tightly curled ends of bracken and had just found some.”

In God’s name, thought Frobisher, what is the woman talking about? He began to sympathise with the others back at the station. A right nutter, this one!

“You can eat them, you know. But when they’re older, they can poison you! Funny, that. Maybe the woman had—”

“Sorry to interrupt,” said Frobisher sharply. He had had enough of this and for two pins would go straight home and release poor young Paddy. “Are we anywhere near the spot?”