IT was not the police who found the body to which the finger had lately belonged; it was Miss Ernestine Craigie, sister to Augusta. Ernestine had gone to the Horndean wood, as was her usual habit, in her Wellingtons and anorak, and with binoculars swinging round her neck. Ernestine was not only president, but was heart, soul and muscle of the Hertfield Royal Birdwatchers’ Society.
The Horndean wood was a somber tract of oak, ash, and bracken which stretched its seemingly endless wetness (bog and marsh), an invitation to all sorts of birdlife, between Littlebourne and the much larger town of Horndean. The wood was unpleasant and unpretty; even in high summer it appeared to be sulking around the edge of winter, its shrubberies a dull brown, its leaves untouched by the usual autumnal glow. Except for the sort of mucking about Miss Craigie had been doing, it was a good-for-nothing, boggy place. Good for nothing, apparently, but bird-watching and murder.
• • •
Police hounds had snuffled through the last place the little dog had been seen rooting—the Craigie sisters’ rosebushes. Fortunately for the sisters, the corpse had not been deposited beneath them. Otherwise the Craigies would have had a lot of explaining to do. They were having a bad enough time as it was. This particular corpse seemed fated to attach itself to them in one way or another. The body had been found not under Augusta’s rosebushes, but by Ernestine: it was lying half-in, half-out of the muddy waters of a narrow stream which cut straight across the Horndean wood.
When Superintendent Jury and Constable Gere arrived on the scene they found a hard knot of police and dogs all seeming to jockey for position. One of the men peeled off from the group and walked toward them.
“ ’Lo, Peter.” He put out his hand to Jury. “You’re from Scotland Yard C.I.D.?” Jury nodded. “I’m Carstairs.” Detective Inspector Carstairs had a beaked nose and somewhat predatory air. “Come on. We found her not half an hour ago. Or, to be more precise, one of the local ladies found her. I had one of our people take her back to her cottage; she held up awfully well, I must say. Still, it’s a shock. She’s there whenever you want to speak to her. Unless—”
“No. That’s fine. Is that the M.E. over there?”
“Yes. Come along, then.”
• • •
The medical examiner was a woman, and she was in the process of finishing up her preliminary examination, tossing her comments over her shoulder to an assistant who stood marking items on a chart of a human form.
“ . . . Hairs adherent to this hand; bag it. Nothing on this hand, but I’d bag it, too.”
The reason, Jury thought, there might have been nothing on that hand was because it had no fingers.
The medical examiner dropped it, quite casually, back on the tree stump, with the direction, “Bag each finger separately.”
Jury took a step forward but was stopped by her assistant’s saying, “Don’t step on that finger, please, sir.”
He looked down and drew his foot back quickly. It was then he noticed the two separate, severed fingers. One had rolled off the stump. The victim, a youngish woman, in her late twenties or early thirties, lay in the shallow and muddy water of the stream. One side of her face was turned down in the water. The water itself was rusty with blood. Except for the one hand, the rest of the body appeared to have escaped mutilation; the cyanosed complexion told Jury she had been strangled.
The doctor rose and dusted her knees free of twigs and leaves. She intoned her findings to Jury. “Dead, I’d say on a prelim, about thirty-six hours. I’d put it at roughly between eight and midnight, Thursday.”
The police ambulance had made its way off the Horndean—Hertfield Road and was trying to maneuver inward along the public footpath. It had to stop some distance from the body. Two men carried over the stretcher and rubber sheet from that point.
“What about the hand, Doctor?”
She pursed her lips, looked at the plastic bag given over to her assistant. “Ax, apparently. It was done in a single blow. That one, there.” She pointed to a small, double-bladed ax lying in the grass.
“Any ideas why the killer’d go to the trouble of cutting off the fingers?” asked Jury.
She shook her head, snapped her bag shut. A woman of few words. She wore a black suit relieved only by a pale shirtwaist, but even that was tied around the throat with a narrow black tie.
“Well, it couldn’t be fingerprints,” said Carstairs, “or he’d have done both hands. And taken away, ah, the fingers. The ax, Gere tells me, belongs to Miss Craigie. The one who found the body. She uses it to clear out underbrush and branches and so forth . . . to see the birds. Miss Craigie’s big on birds.” Inspector Carstairs pulled on his earlobe, as if embarrassed to drag this frivolity into it.
“Could it have been a woman?” asked Jury of the medical examiner.
Her every word was dipped in acid: “ ‘Could it have been a woman?’ Yes, Superintendent. You’ll find that we can do all sorts of things—dress ourselves, ride two-wheelers, do murders.”
Chalk one up for women’s lib, he guessed. “Sorry.” She left, and Jury and Carstairs looked down at the body. The black coat was scummy with algae and the hair was a net to trap twigs and leaves.
Sergeant Wiggins and Peter Gere tramped toward them, away from the clutch of Hertfield policemen looking the ground over.
Wiggins looked down at the mutilated hand as the woman was being wrapped in the rubber sheet. “Why d’ya suppose he cut off the fingers?”
Jury shook his head. “He wasn’t just saying good-bye.”
They were back in Peter Gere’s one-room office on the High warming their hands around mugs of tea and coffee.
“No identification,” said Carstairs. “Labels in her clothes were Swan and Edgar and Marks and Sparks. Anyway, you could tell from the quality she didn’t do her shopping at Liberty’s. Looks pretty much the shop girl type to me. Bit heavy on the jewelry, too. Only thing to tell us where she comes from was this.” Carstairs drew a small envelope from his pocket and shook the contents out on the desk. “My sergeant handed me this just before we left the wood. A day return to London. Found it down in the coat lining, apparently slipped through a hole in the pocket.”
Jury looked at the date, September fourth, two days before. “She wasn’t a local, then.”
“Guess not.” Then Carstairs added, as if he didn’t want to let the girl go entirely, “But we shouldn’t completely discount that.”
“Say she was,” said Wiggins, holding his cup close to his nose and breathing in steam, “still, it’s not likely she’d be having a walk along that footpath in the dark, would she? In that wood? And dressed the way she was?”
Carstairs looked at Wiggins as if he were a pile of unwashed socks, but had to agree, nonetheless. “This Miss Craigie, the one who found her. The Craigie woman said she must have passed by that spot when she was out that night having a tramp in the woods—”
“What time?” asked Peter Gere.
“She’s uncertain about that. Nine or nine-thirty, possibly even ten. At any rate, after dark.”
“What would she have been walking in the wood for at that hour?” asked Wiggins, handing his cup back to Gere for seconds.
Peter Gere answered: “Owls. Miss Craigie’s the head of the local birdwatching society. Spends a good deal of time in Horndean wood. It’s wonderful for birds, she claims—all nice and wet and boggy.”
“Sounds a dim pastime,” said Wiggins, pulling his jacket more tightly about him. The little police office’s single night storage heater was no match for Wiggins. “So that puts her out there at the time of the murder, sir,” he said to Jury.
Gere laughed. “Well, I must admit she’s certainly got enough brute force for it—only, wait a moment: you surely don’t think this was done by a local, do you?” With a worried frown, he was tamping tobacco down in his pipe.
“Maybe not, but you’ve had your share of troubles here, Peter. What about these?” Carstairs reached in his inside pocket and dropped a brown packet on the table. “Have a look, Superintendent.” His smile was enigmatic, as if he could hardly wait for Scotland Yard to cast its eye on this little lot.
It was a plain, brown mailing envelope, postmarked in Hertfield and addressed to the Littlebourne sub-post office. Jury opened it and took out a packet of letters held together with a rubber band. He flipped through the envelopes and said, “Crayon?”
“Interesting, isn’t it? Much more difficult for forensics than ink or typewriter impressions. They haven’t come up with anything yet.”
Jury opened and read the first, written in green crayon, to a Miss Polly Praed, Sunnybank Cottage. “It would appear Miss Praed has been getting up to all sorts of mischief without ever leaving her home. Gin. Dope.” He set it aside and picked up the second, this one in orange, to a Ramona Wey. “Not very long, are they?”
“And not very naughty, either, except for the ones to Augusta Craigie and Dr. Riddley. Hard to write for very long in crayon.”
Augusta Craigie’s letter was done in purple. “Miss Craigie gets around, doesn’t she? So far three different men have been cited here, in various states of dress and undress.”
Peter Gere smiled. “If you knew Augusta—that’s Ernestine’s sister—you’d see it’s very unlikely. She was rather proud of her letter, I’d say. We were wondering if perhaps she was the writer just so’s she could send one to herself.”
“It’s not usual to do that,” said Jury. “Seems a thin motive for writing all the others. Poison pen letter-writers usually get a sense of power from controlling other people’s lives, like a voyeur or an obscene telephone caller.” Jury opened the next one. “You got one, Peter, I see.”
Blushing, Gere scratched his neck with the stem of his pipe. “Pretty dull. Done in gray, which is all my personal life deserves, I guess. ‘Skulduggery’—there’s an old-fashioned word for you—when I was working for LT.”
Carstairs clucked his tongue at Peter in mock reproof. “The one to Riddley is a dandy. He’s the local medic, young chap and attractive. Blue.” Carstairs picked it out of the pile.
Jury read the detailed description of what Dr. Riddley was doing with Ramona Wey. “Is she that sexy?”
“Good-looking,” said Peter, “but a bit of an iceberg. She runs an antiques business in Hertfield.”
There were no addresses on the envelopes, only names. All of the letters had been stuffed in the one brown envelope and sent along to the local post office.
“So who got this lot?”
“Mrs. Pennystevens. Well, of course she thought it damned odd, but she just handed them over to the various locals when they came in for bread or stamps. She said she thought they must be party invitations, or something.”
“Some party,” said Wiggins, who was reddening up a bit as he scanned them.
“Ordinary Crayolas you could find in any W. H. Smith’s or any home with kiddies in it.”
“Or without kiddies.” Peter Gere opened the side drawer of the desk and took out some stubs of crayons and a couple of coloring books which he tossed on the table. “Not mine, actually. They belong to a little girl here. Has a passion for coloring, Emily does. She leaves the damned things everywhere. I found these on the window ledge.”
Jury shook his head as he reread the letter to Augusta Craigie. “These letters don’t ring true.”
Carstairs looked at him. “Meaning?”
“Meaning I don’t believe them.” He tossed the letter on the table. “They’re like a game or something. They don’t even sound serious.”
“People round here are taking them seriously, believe me,” said Peter.
Carstairs looked at his watch, set down his cold coffee cup. “Look, I’ve got to get back to Hertfield station. Anything I can do to help, let me know, Superintendent. We can have a mobile unit over here immediately, if you like. I only thought, that since Hertfield’s so close—”
“That’s fine. Just keep your men searching that wood.”
Carstairs nodded, raised two fingers to his cap in a mock military salute and said, “Thanks for the coffee, Peter. You still make it out of steel shavings, I see.” He smiled and was gone.
• • •
The packet of letters lay on the desk. Jury spread them out. “A veritable rainbow of poison-pennery. This girl that got murdered. Do you think there’s any relationship between these and her?”
“I don’t see how,” said Peter Gere. “I hadn’t thought of it, I expect. Are you talking about blackmail?”
“No. That wouldn’t be a very lucrative way of operating, would it? To publish the sins and then try and collect.”
Wiggins came out of the collar of his overcoat, where he must have been turning things over in his chilly way. “You know, it doesn’t seem to me that ticket stub in her coat proves she was a Londoner. It could have been put there by someone else to make us think she was from London.”
Gere touched the brown envelope. “These were mailed in Hertfield the Tuesday before last. But that doesn’t prove a damned thing. What you say is possible, of course.”
Wiggins went on to expound his theory. “Seems odd to me, the murderer having taken the rest of the identification and not going through the pockets.”
“It was down in the lining, remember. Slipped through,” said Jury.
Wiggins thought for a moment. “It’s even possible, you know, it wasn’t her coat.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, there she was all tarted up in that green dress and eyeshadow you could take a shovel to”—Wiggins’s tone was disapproving—“and all that costume jewelry. That black cloth coat doesn’t fit the picture, does it?”
Both Wiggins and Gere continued to weave out of beautiful whole cloth their black-cloth-coat theory. Jury left them to it, assuming all the while that the ticket was just what it said: she’d come down from London and meant to go back that day.
Jury had a lot of respect for provincial police forces. Their incorruptibility was almost legendary. Some of their detractors in the M.P.D. liked to call them a “bunch of effing swedes,” but that, to Jury, was sour grapes. He had still not gotten over the trials and imprisonments of some of his colleagues a decade ago. He was not naïve, of course; but he supposed he was a trifle romantic. He believed in the verities: Queen, country, and the football pools. He looked at Peter Gere, the village bobby, and felt a real respect. Still, it was difficult working over someone else’s patch.
It was a pleasant patch, though, he thought as he tilted back his chair and looked out at Littlebourne Green. Not even the police descending on it seemed to have wakened the village from its golden September dream. The High seemed isolated from the violence that had invaded the wood beyond, like a stone heaved through a sunny window. Across the Green, an old man shuffled out of the single pub, the Bold Blue Boy. Farther along a woman with a basket over her arm went into a sweet shop. Only the cluster of three villagers who seemed to have collided in the middle of the Green was proof that something was going on, for there was much gesticulating and pointing toward the station.
No, not three, four villagers. A little girl emerged from the group and stood staring at the station or the C.I.D. car or both.
Jury was half-listening to Wiggins and Gere. The murdered woman was no local, he was sure. She fairly screamed London. He had seen dozens of her up and down Oxford and Regent Streets. Why not look for the simplest explanation?
While Jury watched the little girl with the straggly blond hair start a side-wise sort of dancing step, he said to the voices behind him, “Maybe so. But in that case, where’s her coat?”
That the original coat would have to be accounted for seemed not to have occurred to them. Neither one answered.
Sunlight was painting lemon stripes across the floor through the venetian blind. Jury looked out again at the Green. The clutch of villagers had diminished by two, leaving the older man and the little girl. He had detached himself from the child and was walking purposefully across the High toward the station. The little girl followed, but at a distance. He was dressed in plus-fours; she was wearing a hacking jacket, too short in the sleeves.
“Do you think we could be going to the pub, sir?” asked Wiggins, rather plaintively. “That wood was awful wet.”
“Sure. But who’s this coming up the walk, Peter?”
• • •
A consortium of thrushes, busy up to that point with a discarded crust on the walk, thronged the air above the elderly man’s head as if they meant to build their nest there. Jury watched him beat at them with his stick. His broad face and chest appeared gargoylelike in the pane of the door before he ushered himself in like a stiff September breeze.
“Peter! This is preposterous! I have been given to understand someone has been found dead in the Horndean wood!” The tone suggested that the local constabulary had better be quick off the mark in explaining this nonsense, or he would hold them strictly accountable.
Jury recognized in Sir Miles Bodenheim (introduced to Jury with noticeable lack of enthusiasm by Gere) the sort of village gentry which has nothing to do with its time other than to take itself very seriously. “Did you have some information you thought relevant, Sir Miles?”
“I know nothing, except I cannot understand why police find it necessary to cut across my south pasture. They’re slogging about over my property as if they owned it.”
“Is your property near the Horndean wood, then?” asked Jury.
“It certainly is. Borders it, as a matter of fact. Rookswood has quite extensive grounds.”
“On the night before last, did you happen to see or hear anything unusual?”
Miles Bodenheim smirked. “Only Miss Wey in Dr. Riddley’s office. Seems a bit late for an appointment, wouldn’t you say?”
Wiggins had his notebook out. “What time was that, sir?”
Sir Miles’s brow shot up. “Time? How should I know? I don’t keep running records on my neighbors’ affairs.”
“Guess,” said Wiggins, wiping his nose with his large handkerchief.
Sir Miles sputtered. “Oh, I don’t know. Sixish, I suppose.”
“I was speaking more of something happening in the wood, Sir Miles,” said Jury.
“Nothing,” he snapped. “I do not prowl the wood at night, keeping track of trysts, Superintendent. And why it’s necessary to call in Scotland Yard is beyond me,” he added for good measure, having forgotten his earlier opinion of the Hertfield constabulary. “But I might as well save my breath to cool my porridge,” he added sententiously.
Jury imagined it would be the first time he saved it. “Is it usual for people to meet there?”
“I shouldn’t think so. We only go there for the birdwatching. I’m secretary-treasurer of the Royal Birdwatchers’ Society.”
“I’ll probably want to talk with you later, Sir Miles, if you can spare me a few moments.”
As Jury predicted, Miles Bodenheim was partial to this beggarly attitude on the part of the police. “I could do, yes. I understand,” continued Miles, sotto voce, “it was a particularly brutal crime. Severed arm is what I heard. I’ve just come from the Craigie sisters. Ernestine is still sedated. Shocking. I had tea with Augusta and got all the details. Terrible, the arm simply—” He made a clicking sound and took a swipe at his own arm with his stick. “Can’t think why anyone would do a thing like that.” Expectantly he looked at Jury, who remained silent. “But she was a stranger. Ah, well.” The implication was that strangers had no one but themselves to blame if they lost their arms. “Well, I hope you Scotland Yard chaps can be a bit quicker than the local police. After all, that’s what we pay you for, isn’t it?” Continuing to converse with himself, Miles said, “Odd, isn’t it? What would anyone have been doing out there in the Horndean wood? Except for us birdwatchers in the Society, I can’t see there’d be any reason for anyone to be there. My wife, Sylvia, agrees.” He was warming to his subject, which had taken an abrupt turn from grisly murder to trespassing. “After all, there’s only the one public footpath, and that’s all overgrown simply because no one uses it. Why should anyone want to go to Horndean that way? It’s a very long walk and Sylvia says she nearly went down whilst she was out with the Society, and that it’s best to stay away from the center of it altogether. Sylvia nearly sunk down a foot, she says—”
Jury took it from the expression on Gere’s face that Sylvia would not have been missed if she had sunk up to her neck. He cut him off by asking, “You’re saying that this wood has never been a place for picnics or lovers’ meetings—?”
Sir Miles gaped. “Lovers? I should hope not!” The suggestion was that lovers, like rabies, were unknown in Littlebourne village. But now his attention was caught afresh by the letters lying on the desk, which Peter Gere had unsuccessfully tried to cover over with his arm. “This village has gone mad. Some pervert allowed to roam about freely amongst us innocent people. Well, some of us innocent people.” He smirked. “Where there’s smoke, you know. You’ll be staying, I expect, Superintendent?”
“Yes. At the Blue Boy.”
Sir Miles’s gray mustache twitched. “Oh, not the Blue Boy, surely. It’s not properly heated and although Mrs. O’Brien does prepare a fairly decent meal, well, I don’t really approve of women publicans, do you? I know women are just chock-a-block all over the place these days, but Mary O’Brien . . . You heard, of course, what happened to her daughter? I’d almost forgot myself, what with everything else that’s happened. And, I suppose, Peter, the police aren’t any forrarder about that, either, are they? It’s been two weeks, after all. Well, Superintendent, I should like to stop here and chat, but I must be going.” Here he tapped his walking stick thrice on the floor as if in magical incantation. “We are at your service,” he offered. “Do not hesitate to come to us at Rookswood for any help you might need.” Then, having satisfied himself that he had set straight the nation’s police forces, Miles Bodenheim threw open the door and sallied forth to mix hot air with cold.
• • •
“What happened to the girl?” asked Jury, putting the packet of letters in his raincoat pocket.
“Katie O’Brien. She’s the daughter of the woman who runs the Blue Boy. She’s been going up to London twice a month for violin lessons and must have been getting some pocket money by playing her fiddle in the tube station.”
“Stupid thing to do,” said Sergeant Wiggins.
“Yes, well, someone landed a blow on her skull. They say it’s a miracle she’s not dead, though I can’t say she’s much better off the way she is. She’s in the Fulham Road Hospital, in a coma. Been like that for nearly two weeks now and it doesn’t look good.”
As they stood up to leave, Jury asked, “Where’d it happen?”
“In the East End. Wembley Knotts tube station. The music teacher lives there somewhere.”
Wiggins popped a cough drop in his mouth and offered the box round. “Not the healthiest part of town for a young girl to be mucking about in,” he said.