That Markby had discovered the existence of Amyas Fichett, and, with it, Ruth Aston’s past history, rankled in Pearce’s heart. This was the case in which he’d hoped to shine. So far he seemed to be trailing in the superintendent’s wake. Determined to make it clear that he, too, was having a measure of success, he presented himself in Markby’s office on his return from Greenjack Farm to announce that he’d found a witness to Hester Millar’s movements on the morning of her death.
‘She was walking straight past that church,’ he told Markby. ‘She ought to have been turning in to it, to open it up like she said she was going to.’
‘And she did do,’ said Markby aggravatingly, ‘because she died inside it.’
‘Ah,’ pointed out Pearce triumphantly. ‘But before she opened it up she went somewhere else and I mean to find out where. I mean, it’s only a little village. There can’t be many places. Someone,’ said Pearce grimly, ‘in that village is holding out on us. She visited someone early on Thursday before she went to open the church. Why hasn’t that person come forward?’
‘What are you intending to do about it?’ Markby asked him.
‘Knock on every ruddy door in that village. Of course,’ he added hastily, ‘we’ve already done that once, but we’ll do it again, and go on doing it until someone tells the truth.’ It made a fine, ringing sentence. Pearce was quite pleased with it.
Markby made no comment but he was thinking Pearce was being optimistic if he was hoping to prise information from the inhabitants of Lower Stovey. He’d had experience of asking questions in that benighted neck of the woods all those years ago and he didn’t anticipate Dave having better luck now than he’d done then.
‘By the way,’ he said. ‘James Holland tells me the Reverend Picton-Wilkes keeps his set of keys to St Barnabas locked in a drawer in his study. He is, apparently, mildly obsessive about security and hotly resented any suggestion his keys could have been borrowed for illicit purposes.
‘I prefer to think whoever holds the mystery keys lives in the village. Someone who wouldn’t be noticed as a stranger going into the church. Those missing keys bedevil this enquiry. There’s always the possibility the killer let himself into the church, re-locked the door from the inside and was waiting for Hester. Against that, we’ve not discovered even the slightest motive that anyone might have to want to harm Miss Millar!’ Markby snorted. ‘I hate apparently motiveless crimes! She wasn’t a villager as such, she was an incomer. Her dealings with the villagers were superficial. She lived quietly with Ruth Aston and Ruth Aston is held in high esteem in Lower Stovey. To harm Hester was to distress Ruth and leave her alone in the world. I’d have said that Hester Millar could’ve done just about anything and Lower Stovey would’ve tolerated it for Ruth’s
sake. But Hester didn’t do anything, did she? Except toddle down to that church and open it up.’
‘I told you,’ said Pearce. ‘They’re a devious lot those villagers. I’ll ask about the keys, too, even if no one will tell me.’
Markby muttered agreement. Inevitably, his mind turned to the personal aspect of events. The more he thought about it, the more he was obliged to admit Meredith had been perfectly right. There was absolutely no way they could live in that village, either in the former vicarage, which in his mind appeared more unsuitable with every passing minute, or anywhere else. He must have been mad to take her out there to view it.
On the other hand, if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have seen the police car going up to the woods and, very likely, information about the discovery of the bones might never have reached him. It’d have landed on someone else’s desk and been consigned to oblivion. Ruth Aston’s touching faith in police efficiency had been misplaced. Every police force in the country suffered from lack of manpower, time and resources. Once the bones had been established as having been lying in the woods for over twenty years, that there were no more of them than a grisly handful and above all, that there was no sign of deliberate violence on them, the chances that anyone would persevere in identifying them would have been slight. Only he, with his memory of Stovey Woods to spur him on, had insisted on tracking them down. Only the amazing good luck of finding distinctive dental work had made it possible. Even so, he suspected that somewhere, the question had probably been asked, was it worth it? Had he been justified in
devoting so much of limited means to something which resulted in no more than a perfunctory inquest and foreseeable verdict? Mrs Hastings, the mystery of her son’s disappearance at least partly solved, would say yes. Authority would probably say no.
Pearce had returned to his theory and Markby reluctantly abandoned his own thoughts to concentrate on what he was saying. He realised he’d missed some of Dave’s assertions and came back at the moment the inspector was declaring, ‘And there’s another thing. Hester was carrying something, something small.’ Pearce made a shape with his hands indicating some spherical object. ‘Linda Jones doesn’t remember what. Hester didn’t have anything with her in that church except her handbag with the usual sort of contents. She didn’t have anything that she’d have had to carry in her hand. So between Mrs Jones seeing her and Miss Mitchell finding her dead, that something disappeared.’ Pearce scowled. ‘Mrs Jones reckoned she couldn’t remember what it was but I think, if that son of hers hadn’t turned up prattling about some ruddy disco for his twenty-first, she might have come up with something.’
Markby, who’d been fiddling with a biro lying on his desk, looked up. ‘What’s that again?’
Pearce blinked. ‘Which bit?’
‘The son with the twenty-first birthday.’
Now why, thought Pearce, should the old man be interested in that bit of trivia? ‘The lad’s name is Gordon,’ he said. ‘Chippy yob with carrotty hair and a motorbike. The message I got was that he doesn’t get on with his dad. He doesn’t live at the farm. He’s twenty-one next Tuesday and he wanted his mum and sister to go to a party he’s got fixed up here in
Bamford. That’s the disco and what do you bet, the kids will be popping pills, high as kites, and underage drinking will be the norm?’
‘If his friends are his age, they won’t be underage drinkers. As for the drugs, if adult members of the family are there—’
Pearce was having none of it. ‘Mrs Jones reckoned Mr Jones wouldn’t be up for a disco. The lad seemed not to care that his father might not go. Rather hoped he wouldn’t, I suspect. I tell you, sir, that is one seriously odd family. There’s an old man who’s potty and—’ Pearce broke off to squint curiously at the superintendent’s desk.
Markby had picked up the biro as Pearce spoke and appeared to be doing sums on a notepad. ‘Twenty-one next Tuesday, is he? We’ve reached the Millennium, 2000. (Or not, if you want to be purist about it!) At any rate, this young chap, Gordon, was born late in April 1979. Which makes him conceived in the earlier part of August 1978. I’m assuming Mrs Jones had a normal forty-week pregnancy.’
Pearce, startled at this unexpected foray into gynaecology, asked, ‘So what?’
‘So, could be significant,’ was the aggravating reply.
Annoyed, Pearce growled, ‘He’s got no connection with Hester Millar that I’ve come across. The bloke doesn’t even live in Lower Stovey. I suppose we can track him down and ask him for his movements, if you think we should. I wouldn’t expect to learn anything from him.’
‘I’m not interested in talking to Gordon,’ said Markby. ‘I’m interested in his mother. Sorry to confuse you, Dave. You’re quite rightly thinking about Hester. I’m thinking about a twenty-two-year-old rape case. When I went out to Greenjack Farm in
1978 in the course of our hunt for the Potato Man, I met young Kevin, as he was. He wasn’t married then.’
‘He was probably courting,’ said Pearce wisely. ‘Linda’s parents farmed Church Farm next door. They mightn’t have been married at the time but they were probably having fun in the hayloft.’
‘Indeed they might. Has Mrs Jones got red hair?’
‘What?’ Pearce blinked again and then looked wary. ‘No, she’s fairish. The sort of blonde who goes grey and you hardly notice it.’
‘Nor does Kevin have red hair and I don’t recall Martin Jones having red hair, either.’
Pearce absently touched his jaw where the tooth had given a malicious twinge. ‘There’s another kid, Becky, goes to Bamford Community College.’
‘It’d be interesting to know if she’s got red or ginger hair,’ Markby said.
There was a silence. ‘Now, let me get this straight,’ Pearce began cautiously. ‘You think young Gordon might be a cuckoo in the nest?’
‘It would explain a certain coolness between him and his supposed father.’
‘Does it matter to us?’ Pearce asked, puzzled.
‘Any child born after an encounter in Lower Stovey in late summer of 1978 about whose parentage there’s any doubt, is of interest to me.’ Markby retorted. ‘Do you know anyone who’s a pupil at that school?’
‘Tessa’s kid sister,’ said Pearce.
‘Do you think you could find out from her without rousing suspicion what colour hair Becky Jones has?’
‘Better if Tessa asks,’ said Pearce immediately. ‘It’s going to look weird, not to say dodgy, if I start asking about red-haired schoolgirls.’
‘Point taken. Would Tessa oblige?’
Tessa, of late, had been anything but obliging. But she’d be intrigued. ‘I should think so,’ Pearce said. He hesitated. ‘Do we need to know who Gordon’s real father might be, always supposing he isn’t Kevin’s son?’
‘Think, Dave!’ Markby said irritably. ‘August 1978! What happened then?’
‘Both Simon Hastings and the Potato Man disappeared,’ said Pearce. ‘Crikey, you don’t think—’
‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ said Markby. ‘I think there were more attacks than ever were reported. We don’t even know that Mavis Cotter was the first, only that she was the first we heard about. Let’s suppose, just as a theory, that Linda, then a young girl, was one of his victims but never came forward. If that were so, she becomes a very important witness indeed. Don’t forget, I believe and have always done that the Stovey Woods rapist was a local man.’
‘Look, sir,’ Pearce began cautiously. ‘I know you’d like to have solved that case. But twenty-two years on—’
‘What’s twenty-two years in a community like Lower Stovey? Oh, there have been incomers over the years, I grant you. New houses where the old school stood. Cottages sold to second-homers. But the core of the village, the old families, they’ll still be there. One or two members might have moved out, as Gordon Jones has moved out. But the families, Dave, they’re still there and village families are mighty close and clannish, as you’ve already found out.’
‘You’re not thinking the rapist might still be living there?’ Pearce sounded even more dubious. ‘Oh, come on, sir. It’s a bit far-fetched. Even if it’s true, we can hardly ask Linda Jones about it. If she kept quiet then, she’s not going to speak up now, is she? Not with the boy just about to celebrate his twenty-first birthday! Wouldn’t be much of a present for him, would it?’ He met Markby’s eye and added hastily, ‘I’ll get Tessa on to asking round about Becky Jones.’
Pearce set off back to his office. Before he reached it, he was waylaid. Ginny Holding appeared before him, flushed in the face and apparently unable to decide whether to look grimly professional or just burst out laughing.
‘You’d better come, sir, if you’ve got a minute.’
‘I haven’t got a minute,’ said Pearce despondently. ‘I never have a minute. If ever I do, he—’ His gaze drifted towards Markby’s office. ‘He finds something to fill it with. What is it? Can’t you deal with it?’
‘It’s about the things you found in the tower at that church. You know, the sleeping bag and—’
Pearce snapped to attention. ‘Yes, I know what we found.’
‘A Mrs Spencer is here. She’s come in with her daughter, Cheryl. They’re down in the interview room. I asked them to wait. They’ve made a statement. Well, the girl has. But I thought you’d like to hear it yourself.’
Mrs Spencer was short, square, red-faced and belligerent. Cheryl was pale and spotty but not unattractive. Her pale blue, slightly protruding eyes glanced over Pearce dismissively as he came in. Her jaws continued to move rhythmically.
‘I already told this officer!’ declared Mrs Spencer. ‘And Cheryl, she signed a statement.’
‘So I understand. I appreciate your waiting. My name is Inspector Pearce.’ Pearce had not missed the dismissive look and it rankled. ‘I’m investigating the events in St Barnabas Church, Lower Stovey.’
Cheryl didn’t exactly sneer but she remained unimpressed. Her mother, however, leapt to her daughter’s defence.
‘Cheryl didn’t have anything to do with any murder!’
Ginny moved in on the conversation, addressing the gum-chewing Cheryl. ‘No one’s saying she did. But the inspector needs to know everything that’s happened in that church recently. Just tell the inspector what you told me, Cheryl.’
‘I’m not under-age,’ said Cheryl. ‘I know what I’m doing. It’s my business and no one else’s, right? Mine and Norman’s. You can’t touch us.’
‘I can!’ snarled her mother. ‘When I’ve finished with Norman, he’ll wish he’d never been born!’
‘Who’s Norman?’ asked Pearce.
‘Norman Stubbings. He runs the pub, the Fitzroy Arms.’ Cheryl paused to remove a putty-coloured wad from her mouth, survey it frowning and look round for somewhere to put it. Holding indicated the ashtray on the table. Cheryl dropped her gum into it. ‘He’s my boyfriend.’
‘No, he isn’t,’ argued her mother. ‘He’s a married man and you ought to know better.’
Cheryl ignored this. ‘I used to work there evenings, washing up glasses. I live in Lower Stovey. It isn’t half a dump,’ she added in parenthesis. Pearce wondered whether there was
anything and anyone other than the absent Norman that Cheryl didn’t despise.
‘Evie, that’s Norman’s old woman, she doesn’t like me. She was always picking on me. She kept snooping round trying to catch me with Norman. Norman didn’t want her making trouble with the brewery. So I started working up at the Drovers’ Rest, on the old way, instead. It’s nice up there. You get interesting people, cyclists, walkers and that and they’ve got a dishwasher. I was sorry not to see so much of Norman, of course.’
‘Wouldn’t you think,’ demanded Mrs Spencer, ‘that a girl her age – she’s only just turned nineteen – would find a young man and not go wasting her time with someone old enough to be her father and married, at that? You silly slut!’ she admonished her daughter.
‘Oh, give over, Mum. You don’t know Norman.’
‘Don’t I? Then that’s just where you’re wrong, my girl! Norman Stubbings was in the primary class when I was in the top class at the old school. Nasty, sneaky little kid with a runny nose, always standing by himself in the corner of the yard because no one would play with him. I remember his mother, a real old besom. Hardly ever sober. She used to stand outside the school and shout at the teachers. We always reckoned she was barmy.’
Holding cleared her throat as a hint. Cheryl obligingly took up her tale. ‘Not working at the Fitzroy Arms any more, it was difficult for me to see Norman, like I said. Then he had this really good idea. See, the pub’s opposite the church. The church is open most of the day but no one goes in it much. Norman, he’d got the keys. He could go in there any time.’
‘Where did he get the keys?’ Pearce asked, startled.
‘He’d always had them. Well, they were his dad’s. Ages ago when it was a proper church and had a vicar, it had a bell-ringing team and Norman’s dad was the captain. He had the keys so that they could all get in there and practise. When it stopped being a proper church, there was no more bell-ringing, but no one asked Norman’s dad for the keys, so he kept them. When he died they were among his stuff and they’d been lying round in a drawer at the pub for years. One of the keys lets you into the tower. There’s a little room at the top. So when I wasn’t working at the Drovers’, he’d give me a call on my mobile, and I’d slip over to the church and wait for him there. As soon as he could get away from Evie, he’d come over and open up the tower and we’d go up there. At first it was really cool.’
‘It was downright disgusting!’ said Mrs Spencer.
‘When?’ asked Pearce. ‘When was the last time you and Stubbings rendezvoused in the tower?’
Cheryl was nonplussed by the term ‘rendezvous’ and enquired if that meant having it off?
‘In your case,’ said Pearce, ‘it probably does.’
‘Ooh, sarky!’ retorted Cheryl. ‘Is that why they made you inspector? Because you knew some long words?’
‘Stick to the point, Cheryl,’ advised Holding hastily.
‘The last time I met Norman in the church – rendezvoused — was before that old woman got stabbed. At least two weeks before that. We’d stopped using the tower. Evie had got so suspicious, he found it harder and harder to get away. He said we should vary our routine, that’s what people should do if they’re being watched, and he said we shouldn’t go there again. I didn’t mind because by then I’d gone off being in the tower. It was fun at first, you know, exciting. But after a bit I got fed up
with hanging around in the churchyard with all those graves, and when I could get inside, it was worse. It’s not much fun being on your own in an empty church with all those stone carvings looking at you. I didn’t mind it when Norman was there with me. But on my own, it gave me the creeps. Norman said not to worry, he’d think of somewhere else.’
‘And did he?’
‘Yeah, Norman’s clever, he thought of the old shed at the back of the car park.’
‘Which,’ said Mrs Spencer, ‘was where I found them last night. I knew that girl was up to something. I heard her muttering on that mobile phone of hers. She’s always got it glued to her ear. I knew she was up to no good from the sound of her voice, whispering all excited. I followed her and I caught ’em at it. Norman, the little toad, he ran off. I made our Cheryl tell me everything. In the church, I ask you. Then I reckoned we ought to come and tell you, because you’ve been investigating in that church. Evie, she’s a spiteful cow, not but what she’s got good reason for it. But she might go telling you she’d seen Cheryl going in there. Just to get her own back, see?’
‘You did quite right, Mrs Spencer and you, Cheryl.’
Cheryl took a fresh stick of gum from her pocket and unwrapped it. Popping it in her mouth, she observed, ‘Norman’s not going to like this.’
Mrs Spencer assured them in bloodthirsty tones that you bet Norman Stubbings wasn’t going to like it, not one bit.
Pearce went back to Markby and gave him the news that the mystery of the tower’s visitors had been solved and it didn’t appear to have anything to do with Hester’s death.
‘By the time Hester was killed, Stubbings and the girl had given up meeting in the tower. They were using some old shed. That Mrs Spencer’s a real old battleaxe. If we find Norman Stubbings with a knife sticking out of his back, we’ll know who did it!’ Dave concluded.
He then drove out to Lower Stovey and proceeded to give the landlord a wretched half-hour.
It was always nice when one could tie up loose ends and Pearce went home happy. Tessa, also in a good mood, proved surprisingly obliging when asked if she’d like to make a few discreet enquiries of her sister regarding Becky Jones. In fact, she was alarmingly keen to do a bit of detective work, as she put it. Pearce was afraid she might get carried away and watched her depart for a visit to her family with some trepidation. He wished the superintendent appeared more interested in who had murdered Hester Millar and less in catching the rapist after twenty-two years. Pearce still doubted the offender had remained in Lower Stovey, if he’d ever lived there. He certainly didn’t believe the Potato Man had come out of retirement after so long simply to stab Hester Millar.
Tessa, while her husband was meditating on these things, was sitting in her sister’s bedroom. She had listened patiently to a long tale of Jasmine’s dramatic break-up with her latest boyfriend, and now that Jaz had got that off her chest, Tessa made her move.
Staring in the dressing-table mirror, she tugged at a strand of her long, pale yellow hair and announced, ‘I’m thinking of dyeing it red.’
‘What, your hair?’ asked Jaz, momentarily distracted from her broken heart. ‘What for?’
‘For a change. Why not? It might suit me.’
‘Dave wouldn’t like it,’ said Jaz sapiently.
‘Don’t see why he shouldn’t.’ Tessa clutched her hair and piled it on top of her head. ‘I want a new look.’
‘Most people want to be blonde,’ said Jaz enviously, studying her own mousy locks, reflected over her older sister’s shoulder.
‘But there are fewer red-heads,’ argued Tessa. ‘How many girls at your school have really red hair or ginger hair? I bet, not many.’
Jaz considered this and said, ‘Michele King has and she hates it. She’s got the freckles that go with it and she can’t sunbathe or anything. She goes bright red. When her family goes on holiday to Spain, she has to cover right up, long sleeves and everything. She wore a bikini one year and she said she ended up looking like a lobster.’
‘But I haven’t got that sort of skin, have I? Anyway,’ said Tessa, ‘not all red-heads have that problem. Isn’t there another kid in your class, Becky something or other, with reddish hair?’
Jaz frowned. ‘The only Becky is Becky Jones and she hasn’t got red hair. It’s light brownish, sort of a bit like mine.’
‘Oh, right, I’m thinking of someone else, then. Anyway, I think I’ll have my hair cut really short.’
‘You’re barmy,’ said Jaz.
Markby was on a trail of his own. Among the photographs on Old Billy Twelvetrees’ mantelshelf stood one of the late Mrs Twelvetrees and three children. He’d seen Dilys. Sandra he’d no idea where to find and wasn’t much bothered. He was interested to find, if possible, young Billy Twelvetrees, the eldest of the trio of glum infants in the picture. Dilys was of an
age with Ruth, who was, he knew, fifty-seven. Young Billy must now be in his early sixties. Which meant that twenty-two years ago, he’d have been just on forty. But there was no record of an interview with him in the file on the Potato Man. Since every other man in the village had been quizzed, how had they missed Young Billy? If he hadn’t been in the village, where had he been?
Tracking down Young Billy wasn’t difficult, as things turned out. The surname was unusual and its owner hadn’t moved far. He lived in Bamford. The house was a narrow terraced one with a pocket-sized front garden which was obsessively neat. Everything in it was to scale, that is to say, small. The principle, Markby supposed, was that you thus could get in everything a bigger garden might have. Bonsai-sized shrubs surrounded a tiny square of grass in the middle of which was a stone basin not bigger than a large dinner plate, filled with pebbles over which dribbled an amount of water you’d be pleased to clean your teeth with. A row of miniature red tulips stood like toy guardsmen in a strip of earth which could hardly be called a bed. It looked more like a tyre-track. On one side of the front door was a Grecian pot the size of a milk saucepan in which was planted a miniature rose. On the other side of the front door crouched a small stone frog, painted green. Markby felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.
The door was opened, unsurprisingly, by a small neat woman without a hair out of place. William, she told him, was in the back garden. Markby was invited to just walk through.
By now as curious to see the garden and the gardener, Markby walked down the narrow hall, through the pint-sized
but amazingly tidy kitchen and out on to a patio. At least, he supposed that was what it was meant to be. The back garden wasn’t much bigger than the front one but obviously designed by the same hand. Thus the patio was four small paving stones long and three wide. On it stood two tiny uncomfortable-looking white plastic garden chairs. The rest of the back garden was laid out in immaculately-hoed square plots, each handkerchief-sized. In each a label announced what kind of vegetable would shortly be poking its head above ground, except for one which was laid out mathematically with onion sets. At the furthest point from the house, reached by Markby in half a dozen strides, a man was carefully arranging six bamboo canes in a wigwam shape.
‘For my beans,’ he informed Markby as the visitor came up. ‘When I get ’em planted. I got ‘em under glass at the moment, waiting for ’em to shoot.’
Markby supposed ‘under glass’ referred to a shoebox-sized cold frame. Even the enterprising Young Billy – or William, as his wife preferred – hadn’t yet found a way to squeeze a greenhouse in this garden. Give him time and he probably would. It was odd to be thinking of a man of sixty-one or two as ‘young’ but Markby could see why people found it necessary. Young Billy bore a remarkable resemblance to Old Billy, being short and square. He was still muscular whereas his father’s muscle mass had atrophied, and still had a countryman’s weather-beaten skin. It looked as though whatever jobs he’d held in life, they’d all been out of doors. A battered flat cap was wedged on his head, a fringe of white hair showing round it. He wore an aged but clean showerproof bomber jacket over a hand-knitted pullover. His
hands, deftly securing the canes, were large and knotted.
‘Good idea,’ said Markby of the bean seedlings. He held up his ID. ‘Mind if we have a chat?’
Young Billy squinted at the ID and said, ‘I ain’t got my glasses. You’ll have to tell me what it says.’
‘It says I’m Superintendent Markby. I’m from the Regional Serious Crimes squad.’
‘Oh, ah?’ Young Billy was engrossed in winding string round the bamboo canes.
‘You come from Lower Stovey, I understand, Mr Twelvetrees.’
‘Oh, ah. When I was a boy. I ain’t lived there for more than forty years.’
‘We’re investigating certain matters in Lower Stovey.’
‘Woman got stabbed, I heard.’
‘Yes. Do you visit your family there?’
‘No. Never got no cause to.’ Young Billy shook his head.
‘You don’t visit your father and sister?’ Markby asked.
‘Them?’ Young Billy finished tying up the bamboo canes to his satisfaction and turned his attention fully to his visitor. ‘Last time I saw the old boy was Christmas. I don’t have no car, no more does he. But my neighbour was going out that way and give me a lift. Our dad hadn’t changed. He’s the same miserable old devil he always was. Don’t know how our Dilys sticks it. She pops round to see us sometimes when she’s shopping in Bamford. That woman she cleans for, Mrs Aston, she gives her a lift in. She don’t change, Dilys, either,’ reflected Billy. ‘She was always a great lump. Good worker, mind.’ This last was added in case Markby should think he sounded disloyal.
Markby didn’t think Young Billy was disloyal. He was realistic. You can choose your friends but not your relatives, as the saying went. But poor Dilys did seem singularly unappreciated by her family.
‘I was in Lower Stovey years ago,’ he said in a conversational way. ‘We were investigating some attacks on women in and around the woods.’
Young Billy squinted up at the sky and then at Markby. ‘That’ll be the old Potato feller.’
‘Yes, you remember, I see.’
‘My wife wrote me about it. It was in the papers, she said. Made Lower Stovey famous, that did!’ Young Billy chuckled hoarsely.
‘Wrote to you? Where were you living then?’
‘I were on the high seas.’
‘What?’ Markby was surprised into exclaiming.
‘I were working on the cargo boats at that time. I liked that, you know. I like being at sea. Lizzie wrote me all about it and I got the letter when we reached the Windward Islands. Bananas, we took on board there. Thousands of ’em.’
Young Billy paused and ruminated on that lost period of his life. ‘I liked it, but not my Lizzie. She didn’t like me being away so much. When I left Lower Stovey I took a room as lodger in Lizzie’s parents’ house. That’s how I met her. We got married at eighteen, just as my dad and mum had done. But we turned out happier than they did, thank goodness. We’ve had our Ruby Wedding. Not bad, is it?’
Markby agreed, wondering whether he and Meredith would ever celebrate any anniversary.
‘Anyhow,’ said William Twelvetrees, ‘because she didn’t like it, I gave it up and came ashore. I got a job down the quarry. I still got a job down there, watchman, though I don’t work full time now. But I don’t mind that. It gives me time for this.’
During his time afloat Young Billy had probably learned to stow things neatly in small spaces and it might explain his ingenious use of his garden. It also deleted him from the Potato Man enquiry.
‘Right,’ said Markby heavily. ‘Thank you. I’ll leave you to your gardening.’
Two steps forward, one step back. But somewhere he was on the right lines, he was sure of it. He just couldn’t see where. It would be difficult, but he had to speak to Linda Jones.
The train rocked slowly out of London. Meredith found herself trapped, cramped in a corner seat, next to a sweaty young man reading a paperback novel. The jacket illustration depicted people living in some mythical past when clothing consisted either of rags or elaborate armour and no one had invented anything in the line of smart casual. As the young man read he chewed gum and breathed through his mouth at the same time, no mean achievement. Meredith had tried to ignore him and concentrate on the Evening Standard crossword but that had been difficult because she couldn’t move her arms. Nor could she move her feet which were imprisoned against the side of the train by the formidable boots worn by a long-legged tough-looking girl sitting opposite. The girl was reading too, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. The fourth occupant of their quartet of seats was a middle-aged man in a business suit who’d fallen asleep the moment the train started.
Well, at least it was Friday once again. The weekend had come around almost before the previous one had gone out of mind. At least it meant two train-journeyless days. What, she wondered idly, did these people do at the weekend? What about the Amazon with the romantic heart? And what about Chewing-Gum-Man here? He wore a wedding ring so it was a fair guess part of his weekend would be taken up with the family weekly shop. As for the business type over there, his head now lolling in a familiar way on the oblivious shoulder of the tough girl, no prizes for guessing he planned a round of golf. And me? she thought. Do any of them wonder about me and what I’ll be getting up to during these precious two days of freedom? Some freedom. I shall spend it viewing undesirable properties with Alan, both of us getting tetchier by the minute. She sighed. That was when her mobile phone began a frenzied rendition of the opening notes of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
Meredith scrabbled in her briefcase and retrieved it. Mobile phones had been going off all over the carriage since they’d started but hers caused a minor stir among her immediate companions. The tough girl became aware of the businessman’s shoulder and pushed his head away. He woke up, harrumphed, and stood up to take down his coat from the overhead rack. The gum-chewer put away his paperback and made similar moves indicating he was getting off at the next stop.
‘Hello?’ Meredith asked the mobile.
The caller was Ruth Aston, which surprised her mildly, before she remembered she’d given Ruth the number of her mobile at the close of the visit she and Alan had paid to The Old Forge. ‘Give me a call if you want to chat,’ she’d invited and Ruth had taken her up on it.
‘I was wondering, Meredith. I dare say you and Alan have plans for the weekend, but if you had time, would you like to come to tea tomorrow? The thing is, Hester made a lot of cakes which are sitting in the freezer. I can’t eat them alone. I can’t throw them out. I’ve given a couple away but it made me feel guilty. So, I thought, if you and Alan have a hour to spare around half-past three or four, say?’
Ruth’s voice tailed away on a hopeful note. It couldn’t hide the underlying despair. She’s been crying to herself over Hester, guessed Meredith. She wants the company.
‘Of course, we’ll come,’ she said. ‘Or I will, anyway. I’ll have to check with Alan.’
Ruth was embarrassingly grateful.
‘I couldn’t refuse. I did tell her to ring me,’ Meredith said, twisting her head in the crook of his arm to look up at him. His head was propped on the sofa back and his eyes closed.
‘It’s all right,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ve got to go out to Lower Stovey sometime, anyway. I want to check on something at Greenjack Farm. Why don’t I drop you at Ruth’s at three-thirty? I’ll go on down to the farm and come back to Ruth’s when I’ve finished there. I shouldn’t be long.’
Meredith said hesitantly, ‘Ruth may expect you to report some progress. How’s Dave Pearce getting on?’
Alan opened his eyes at that. ‘Slowly. But James Holland at least will be a happy man.’
‘You’ve found the missing tower key?’ Hastily she added, ‘Am I not supposed to know about it? James told me.’
‘I didn’t tell him not to. Quite the opposite, I asked him to check everywhere he could to find the key. Half Bamford must
know about it. In the end, we turned up a complete set of keys about which the church authorities had known nothing.’
‘Who had them?’
‘Would you believe it? Norman Stubbings, landlord of the Fitzroy Arms. Seems he’s the local Don Juan and was in the habit of taking his latest conquest to the tower to have his wicked way.’
‘The thought,’ Meredith said, ‘makes my skin creep. Not the tower so much as Norman Stubbings’s amorous embrace. Well, Norman and the tower together. Just imagine, Norman creeping about the belfry like Quasimodo. I always thought that man seriously weird. You don’t think he might have had something to do with Hester’s death?’
‘He has no motive and I can’t put him in the church at the time.’ Alan chuckled. ‘He got a scare when Dave turned up, demanded the keys and threatened to charge him with withholding evidence. He handed them over as meek as a lamb. His wife, little fat woman—’
‘Evie,’ Meredith informed him.
‘Evie, then. Evie was hopping about in the background insisting Norman couldn’t have been in the church the morning Hester died because he’d been on the phone to the brewery on and off for the best part of an hour from nine onwards. Dave checked that out and it’s true. After that, apparently, Stubbings had to fix one of the pumps and didn’t leave the bar.’
‘He said something about that to me, not on the day of the murder, on the Saturday when I called by his pub after I’d seen Ruth. Just before he threw me out.’ Meredith was loath to support Norman’s story but was impelled by a sense of fair play.
‘He has a witness for the day itself. A friend of Evie’s popped in for a chat and saw him at work. It seems he was quite abusive towards the visitor who described him to Pearce as “a miserable old git.” Norman doesn’t have many friends but he does have an alibi. I’m glad we can rule the keys out of our enquiry but I was never convinced it was a lead. The footprints in the tower were old and dusty and it’s so easy to hare off on a false trail, getting too excited about things like that. Investigation into big crimes has a way of turning up a host of small sins.’
‘Pity you can’t arrest him for something,’ she said wistfully.
He chuckled. ‘Not worth the time or trouble, even if we managed to find a charge. It’s like I said. You trawl a net hoping it’ll snare a big fish. If you pull out a minnow like Norman Stubbings you just have toss him back in the river.’
‘He broke into the church tower!’ she pointed out.
‘Not technically. He had a key.’
‘He was trespassing.’
‘Not of itself a crime.’ Markby shook his head. ‘He misbehaved up there but he didn’t do any damage to the place nor did he steal anything. If the bishop wants to proceed with a civil action for trespass, that’s up to him. I’m after a killer.’
‘So you’re back at square one?’
‘Did we ever leave it?’ he asked wryly. ‘However, Dave’s a tenacious sort of copper. He’s found a witness who saw Hester in the street outside the church.’ He frowned. ‘His witness says, Hester was carrying something. Ruth had the same impression and it might be worth asking her if she’s managed to remember what it was.’
On this low-key note they arranged their return to Lower Stovey.