III

A Postcard

HOW SHAMEFULLY LITTLE you know about the people who work for you, Piet reflected as he walked away from the Golden Fleece. Before the Netherwick case Sergeant Clifford was no more than a name to him, and even in the Netherwick affair he had been simply a subordinate officer carrying out mostly routine inquiries. Yet all the time he was a husband and father, with skills and ambitions as an innkeeper, and a wife who was a competent hotel manageress. Her competence was apparent as soon as he entered the hotel part of the Golden Fleece, and Sergeant Clifford was right about the lunch – it was a simple, well-cooked meal, admirably served. The Cliffords considered themselves lucky to have acquired the Golden Fleece; Piet thought that the brewery was lucky to find people of the quality of the Cliffords for one of their inns.

Walking back to the green he noticed the rectory on the other side of the road, a detached modern house, with two gates and a small semi-circular drive. Like the churchyard, the lawn needed cutting, though not so badly. An elderly Ford car stood in the drive. A rector with four country churches to look after would need to use a car a lot, and few congregations have yet caught up with the costs of having the services of a priest. Piet doubted whether the parish’s contribution to the rector’s expenses went far to meet the real costs of maintaining his car, and by today’s standards his stipend was probably less than many a factory worker’s wage. Truly a priest needed a vocation. When the great Georgian rectory was built the priest was on equal terms with the squire – if his living included a lot of the surrounding farmland, in almost every sense he was the squire. A better society? Who could say? Better for the beneficed Anglican clergy, no doubt, but not so good for their tenants and farm labourers. Yet there were devoted priests in the opulence of the eighteenth century as there are devoted priests in the poverty of the clergy today. Did more poverty mean more devotion, or do constant nagging worries about making ends meet sap faith? It was the society Piet had to police, and although he might be concerned about its relativities and moral values, he had to take them as they came.

Before getting into his car Piet walked round the green to have a look at the row of Rectory Cottages. There were four of them, the standard country cottages of their period, two rooms upstairs, two down. These were well looked after, with neat little front gardens, and probably a bigger strip of garden at the back. Farm labourers’ cottages, built to be rented at perhaps sixpence a week, or twenty-five shillings a year; now they were desirable country residences, and would command prices of anything up to £30,000 or so. It was generous of that ex-Governor to let one to a cleaning-woman. Piet didn’t know what rent he charged, but he was sure that it would not be much.

The rector had said that Bella Marshall’s cottage was the end one of the row. He hadn’t said which end, but three of the cottages had television aerials and the one nearest the church had not. It seemed a reasonable assumption that the home without TV was Mrs Marshall’s. He had no intention of calling on her, but walked past slowly, taking in the surroundings. He could see the Post Office across the green, and the run from the shop to Rectory Cottages couldn’t have taken more than a minute. Bella Marshall was not at home, because she left at 6 a.m. for her job at the Golden Fleece. The boy had said that when he cut his hand he went into the Post Office for help because he thought they didn’t have any sticking plaster at home. The fact that his mother had already left for work may have been another sub-conscious reason – an eighteen-year-old with a bad cut might have wanted motherly reassurance, and the Postmistress would have provided this. It was not evidence, but it was another scrap of reasoning in favour of the boy. Piet checked his thinking. There was next to nothing in favour of the boy, his story was wildly improbable, and it was about as certain as anything can be that he had been rightly convicted. Yet there were little things that needed explaining, and one or two that were not so little. The main puzzle was the time of the break-in – why do it in daylight, when it could so easily have been done at night? Had the shop doorbell tinkled when the door was forced? Presumably it had, for the bell was the old-fashioned kind rung by a trip-catch activated by opening the door. The boy had said nothing about hearing the bell ring as he went into the shop. If he was telling the truth, and the door was open when he entered, then the bell wouldn’t have rung, because the bell-trip would not have moved. Here again negative evidence slightly corroborated the boy’s story. But why should he have said anything about the bell’s not ringing? His counsel didn’t ask him about it – Piet felt once more that the defence could have been better briefed. Should the police have asked about the bell? He must check the papers, but as far as he could recall the shop bell was mentioned nowhere. Piet rather felt that one of the investigating detectives should have asked about the bell, and that to have omitted any question about it was a slip-up. But it was easy to think this with hindsight – no detective can ask about everything. All the same, Piet was not entirely happy about the bell.

He studied Bella Marshall’s cottage as he walked past. There was a small porch. The front door had a brass knocker and a brass door handle, both brightly polished. There was an old-fashioned keyhole with a brass surround – it was because of the polished brass that he could see the keyhole. Had the boy locked the door when he went out, and did he have to unlock it when he ran home? Again, he did not seem to have been questioned about this. There were only two windows in the front of the cottage, both small, and glazed with small panes. One was presumably for the front parlour, the one above it for a bedroom. There were no bathrooms in cottages when these were built, and although he could not see it Piet thought it probable that a bathroom was built on at the back. That would have a window, too.

*

On his drive home Piet thought about the village generally and about Sergeant Clifford in particular. How accurate was the sergeant’s view of the villagers’ attitude to Bella Marshall? How accurate was his view about Netherwick’s general tolerance of black people? Probably he was reasonably near the truth. He was a village man himself, brought up in a village pub, where all the age-old traditions, suspicions, and generosities of village life would be reflected. The tradition that anyone from outside the village was a stranger and therefore to be suspected was real, but the generosities were real, too. Nothing can be kept secret in a village, but the village itself maintains a kind of collective secrecy about its inhabitants. Bella Marshall was the mother of a murderer, but she herself was apparently liked and even respected up to a point. Her courage in staying on at Netherwick would not be analysed, but it would be understood. That she happened to be black was, in this context, almost irrelevant – she was an incomer, and whether she came from a Caribbean island, from Manchester or London made no difference. Whether the village was really as generously disposed to black immigrants as Sergeant Clifford had suggested was another matter. Piet felt that what the sergeant said was true, but he feared it was a rather superficial truth. If there had been competition in Netherwick for jobs or houses there might have been resentment at Sir Gordon Gregory for letting Bella Marshall and her son have his cottage instead of making it available to local people, but probably there was no local family that wanted it. These picture-book villages in Berkshire and Oxfordshire are no longer self-supporting. Tractors and combine harvesters do the work once done by men and horses, and the local trades that supported the men and horses, the farriers and the cobblers have gone. Youngsters looking for work have to turn to Oxford, Swindon, Reading and towns even farther afield. The villages have found a new life as homes for commuters, who work in towns but want to live in the country. Since nowadays such travel to work must almost all be done by car it tends to be expensive, which makes village living more practicable for the better-off. There is sometimes resentment at the effect of their purchasing power on house prices, but the older villagers, who own their cottages, benefit when they or their heirs come to sell, so feelings are mixed. Reflecting on these things Piet felt that the good qualities in village life probably outweigh the narrowness and inbred suspicions – and inbreeding is becoming steadily less as each generation of young people has to move away. The young men who stood up for black people in Sergeant Clifford’s pub were probably showing a genuine desire for fair play, exhibiting the village at its best. But then they had not themselves suffered from unfair play. Sir Gordon’s efforts to get immigrants away from black ghettoes in towns to jobs in the countryside were admirable. But there were so few jobs actually in villages that his campaign could help only a tiny minority. Still, that did not make it any less worth trying. It was tragic that it had turned out so badly. Was it possible that the old Governor was right about his protégé and everybody else wrong?

*

Piet got home at once disconsolate and feeling slightly happier. He was sick at heart about the plight of Bella Marshall, condemned to live in alien surroundings with a weight of grief that nothing could lighten. But her circumstances could have been much worse; she had a home, a job which she could do well, and thoroughly decent employers. At least the community in which she lived seemed kindly, though she must be dreadfully lonely. And she had her own courage, buoyed up by her belief in her son. That might never be justified – all the evidence still suggested that it was quite unjustifiable – but that did not matter. If she believed, her own faith was the important thing in her life.

Was her faith wholly unjustifiable? Piet was happier in his own mind to have a clear picture of Netherwick, but he was no happier about the boy’s conviction. It wasn’t so much that he could rationally doubt the boy’s guilt, but he felt that the case for the defence had not been adequately presented. If it had been it would probably have been demolished by the prosecution, but at least the little nagging doubts about matters not gone into at the trial would have been removed. The boy had legal aid, of course, and doubtless both solicitor and counsel had done what they could for him. They had not persuaded him to plead guilty – whether they had tried Piet did not know. They had put forward his plea of innocence and argued his story fairly. But it remained a preposterous story, and no one seemed to have tried particularly hard to find any real evidence to support it. Piet did not blame his own officers for the things they had not investigated, but he would have felt better if they had been investigated. The shop doorbell was material evidence. The boy might have lied about it, he might have been so absorbed in forcing the lock that he hadn’t noticed a tinkle from the bell, but he hadn’t been given a chance to lie because no one had asked about the bell. If he had sworn that there was no tinkle from the bell when he entered the shop it would have supported slightly his story that he had found the Post Office door open. The old Governor’s suggestion that the cutlass had been used in a way that no West Indian would have used it ought to have been explored at the trial. It was not mentioned because it did not seem to have occurred to anyone to mention it. It was not in itself evidence, but it was a medical fact that the Postmistress had been bludgeoned to death as if hit by the flat of the heavy cutlass, and had not been cut by its sharp edge. Neither in examination nor cross-examination had the boy been asked how he had used the cutlass, and he ought to have been asked. The stolen money was undeniably found in his room, but it was curious that there was no blood on it. And his mother’s cottage had not been searched until a few hours after the boy’s arrest. From the look of the windows they would not be difficult to open from outside. The police had the boy and the blood-stained weapon. Searching his home was a necessary piece of routine investigation, but in the circumstances the boy himself would have been dealt with first. It was not known until later in the morning how much money was missing from the Post Office safe. The finding of the money was damning evidence against the boy, but it had not been found on him, and there ought to have been more investigation into when and how he had put it under the shirts in his chest of drawers. His own story was that he knew nothing about the money, or how it got into his room. Again that seemed preposterous and the jury had simply disbelieved it, but that was not quite enough. For himself, Piet wanted to know whether there had been any time after the boy’s arrest when the cottage was left unguarded, whether the door was locked when the boy was taken off, whether Bella Marshall, fetched from her job at the Golden Fleece, had spent the whole morning in the cottage, whether there were any signs of possible entry from a window, or at the back. It would be difficult to go into all these matters now, but if there ever seemed any reason for reopening the case they were things that should be gone into. Were the police blameworthy for not investigating them at the time? He could not be sure that they hadn’t been investigated, at any rate to some extent. All he had were the papers on the case. The boy’s statements were recorded, the finding of the money by Chief Inspector Gray was reported, but nothing else. It did not follow that the chief inspector had not kept his eyes open – all that could be said was that he had not reported looking into the matters that now interested Piet. He could be asked, of course, but that would imply that there was some doubt about the case, and that the Chief Constable was dissatisfied with the way he had handled it. That was the last impression that Piet wanted to give, and as things stood it would be an unfair one. He could talk to the chief inspector, but he would have to be careful in what he said.

*

He had spent Saturday morning and half the afternoon away from Sally and Jo, but he was home in time for a good romp with Jo, and in the evening he and Sally had some friends in for dinner. On Sunday he put the Marshall case out of his mind as far as he could, and occupied himself by finishing and framing his watercolour of Netherwick Church. He was pleased with it and he looked forward to giving it to the rector – perhaps he would be able to drive over to Netherwick before going home one day during the week.

*

On Monday morning he had not been in his office for ten minutes when the phone rang. It was the superintendent at Newbury, with good news. ‘We’re holding a man for those farm and pillar-box fires,’ he said. ‘PC Talbot arrested him last night, outside that barn near Joyce’s Green that we’ve been watching. Caught him red-handed. He’d actually put a match to some straw and was striking another when PC Talbot jumped on him. He got away for a few minutes because Talbot had to stamp out the fire, but he chased him across two fields and found him trying to hide in a ditch. It was damned good work. We held him for questioning last night. At first he denied everything, said he was just out for a walk, saw the officer running towards him, and jumped in the ditch because he was frightened. But he didn’t keep it up, and in the middle of the night said that he wanted to make a statement. He’s admitted everything, fires at farms going back over more than three years, and setting fire to the pillar-boxes. He’s a schoolmaster, and he’s probably three parts mad. There hasn’t been time to go into all his background yet, but we’ve charged him, he’s coming up before the magistrates this morning, and we shall ask for a remand in custody. I don’t see him being allowed bail – he’s too dangerous to be out. Hope you’re not up to the eyes in Monday morning work, but I rang because I thought you’d like to know about it first thing.’

‘You were quite right, and I’m very grateful to you, and to PC Talbot. You must let me know if you’d like anything done about him. Anyway, give him my congratulations, and tell him that I shall try to convey them personally as soon as I can.’

‘That chief of ours has some queer ideas sometimes, but I reckon we’d have to go a long way to find a better one,’ the Newbury superintendent said to a sergeant standing by him as he put down the phone.

*

Piet was contemplating going to Newbury to congratulate the man there when his secretary came in to say that Sir Gordon Gregory had called again. Piet glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better see him, I suppose,’ he said, ‘but I can’t give him much time because I’ve got to get over to Newbury. I don’t want to hurt his feelings, though. Can you come in after ten minutes with a message that calls me out of the office?’ She smiled, and nodded – she knew Piet. Then she slipped out and came back with Sir Gordon.

‘Again it is good of you to see me,’ he said, ‘but I thought you ought to have this as soon as possible. It came this morning.’ He handed Piet a brown Post Office envelope. Inside was an official note regretting delay in delivery of the contents, and explaining that this was because of damage by fire. The contents consisted of one picture postcard, considerably charred. The picture was a photograph of Netherwick Green. The address-half on the other side of the card was badly burned, with only

. . . . . . . .e-ory

O. .R. . . . .

. . . . . . wick

decipherable. The date on the message half of the card was clear – April 7th. Some of the message could be read

. . . . tried call today but no good. Sorry

didn’t . . . but just . . . . . on way to . . . .

Bought card your charming shop. Hope all . . . Got

leave for US tomorrow. Better luck next . . . .

The signature was a scrawl that looked like ‘Jim’.

The date struck Piet at once – it was the day before the murder of the postmistress. It seemed pathetic rather than significant. Whoever Jim was he must have been one of her last customers, but his card seemed to have no bearing on her death. Its delivery six months after it was posted was a triumph rather than a black mark for the Post Office, for the address was so charred that it was all but meaningless. The delay was understandable, for the letters in a box damaged by fire would have been sent for forensic examination for possible clues to the kind of fire, and then they would have gone back to the Post Office for decipherment or final disposal by the Dead Letter Office. Partly for politeness, partly because his natural curiosity was mildly stimulated by the mutilated message, he said, ‘You can guess at least some of the burned-out words. “Sorry didn’t” was presumably to say he was sorry he didn’t telephone or write beforehand instead of just looking in. I can’t suggest where he was going, but you may know. Is he an old friend?’

‘Yes, Jim Coverdale, an official of the US State Department, though he’s retired now. I met him when I was seconded for a time to our Embassy in Washington, and we’ve always kept in touch. He comes to England most years and generally spends a few days with me. This time he was rather tied up with family visits – his father went to the States from England, and his mother was also English, so he has a lot of English relations. I think he was probably on his way to London Airport – if he had an early flight he would stay the night at a hotel there.’

Piet’s mind went back to arson. ‘He may have bought the postcard in Netherwick, but he couldn’t have posted it there. We have had trouble with fires in pillar-boxes, but not at Netherwick.’

‘He says he bought the card at Netherwick, but he needn’t have written there. It must have been late in the afternoon. I’ve checked in my diary and I was in all day until about 4.30, when I had to go to Oxford. The Post Office closes at 5.30, and if the shop was just shutting up he wouldn’t have wanted to be in the way. He must have written and posted somewhere he stopped for a meal.’

‘The Post Office will probably know which damaged pillar-box it came from,’ Piet said. He glanced at his watch. ‘With respect, Sir Gordon, I can’t see that it matters much.’

‘It doesn’t matter at all.’

‘Then why . . .’

‘Look at the stamp, man, look at the stamp!’

The stamp was badly smudged from the charring of the card but it was intact. For a moment it seemed a perfectly ordinary English stamp, with the familiar head of Queen Elizabeth II. Then Piet noticed – the profile of the head was reversed, facing the right hand edge of the stamp instead of the left. He rang through to his secretary. ‘Can you please bring me a couple of envelopes from today’s mail, with the stamps on them?’ he asked.

She was there in a moment, with the envelopes retrieved from her wastepaper basket. As she handed them to him she said dutifully, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir, but the superintendent at Newbury has been on the phone and he wants to see you urgently. He can’t come here because he wants to show you something at Newbury, and he says it’s important.’

‘I think I know what it’s about. Tell him I’ll be over as soon as I can. But I must look at these envelopes first. I’ll let you know when I’m free.’

The secretary had done what Piet had asked her about rescuing him from Sir Gordon. She had no idea what had happened, but she knew that something had, and she knew also that Piet wanted no more interruptions until he sent for her. When she had gone out Piet put Sir Gordon’s postcard on his desk with the envelopes from the morning’s post beside it. There was no doubt about it. In the stamp on the postcard the royal portrait was reversed.

Piet’s mind was racing. Stamps are printed by the million, and although there have been imperfections much sought by stamp collectors they are rare in British stamps, and if they do occur are likely to affect a sheet of stamps rather than a single one. If the stamps on Sir Gordon’s postcard had come from Netherwick Post Office it must have come from a sheet: where were the rest of that batch? Philately is highly organised, with collectors and dealers always on the look-out for valuable stamps, and if there had been a whole sheet, possibly several sheets, printed with the Queen’s head reversed it seemed inconceivable that nobody had noticed. Was Sir Gordon’s stamp a genuine misprint, or could it be a one-off imperfection? He took a magnifying glass from a drawer in his desk and studied the stamp. As far as he could see beneath the smudging and the postmark the stamp seemed wholly normal apart from the extraordinary reversal of the Queen’s head.

‘You are doing what I did,’ Sir Gordon said. ‘I have been a stamp collector all my life, and I look at stamps instinctively. This is not some badly printed or spoiled proof. It is a stamp identical with those in normal use, except that the portrait is reversed.’

‘Could it occur only on one stamp?’ Piet asked.

‘I am a philatelist, not a printer, though after a lifetime’s study of stamps I know something of the processes by which they are produced,’ Sir Gordon said. ‘If this were an error of perforation it could, just possibly, affect only one stamp at the corner of a sheet. But I do not see how a change of engraving could appear on only one stamp. The postmark is a special one by the department of the Post Office dealing with damaged mail – obviously my card was un-postmarked when it was collected from the fire-damaged letter box. It is quite a light postmark. The stamp will have to be removed from the card for examination of the paper and ink, but it looks genuine enough.’

‘Do you read the stamp-collecting papers?’

‘I get catalogues and newsletters from the main dealers, and I have one or two specialist magazines.’

‘And you have seen nothing about such a stamp?’

‘Nothing. If anyone who knows anything about stamps got hold of one it would not be a matter for specialist magazines – it would be widely reported as a big news-story. Anyone possessing such a rarity could make a great deal of money.’

‘Many people scarcely notice stamps on letters. I suppose it’s possible that other stamps with the reversed portrait have simply not been noticed.’

‘Most things are possible, but if the change of engraving affected a whole sheet there must be at least 200 of them.’

‘Why 200?’

‘Stamps are normally supplied to Post Offices in sheets of 200, and since I do not believe that only a single stamp could have been printed like this I think you must accept that there was at least one sheet of similar stamps. And I do not think that 200 of them would have gone unnoticed. More people than is commonly realised are interested in stamps, and always on the lookout for possible rarities. And many postmen have some knowledge of stamps.’

‘Yours passed through the Post Office without being noticed.’

‘My card was handled by a special department concerned with damaged mail. You will know more about the work of detecting arson than I do – if experts are looking for evidence of arson they are unlikely to pay close attention to a stamp. You were not thinking about stamps when I gave you the postcard, and you did not notice the stamp until I mentioned it.’

‘No, but I think I should have noticed it if I’d had the card for prolonged examination. But obviously it wasn’t noticed, so it is idle to speculate. If there was a whole sheet of such stamps, what do you think has happened to the rest of them?’

‘My own deduction would be that the remaining stamps from this sheet have not gone through the mail.’

‘Where can they have gone?’

Sir Gordon got up. ‘That, Chief Constable, is surely a question for you.’

Piet said nothing for a moment. Then he, too, stood up, and held out his hand. ‘Yes. But I think it also concerns you, Sir Gordon, because it means that we must reopen the Marshall case. May I keep your postcard for the moment? And may I ask you to say nothing to anyone about the stamp?’

‘I understand. Of course I shall say nothing. Doubtless you have your own experts in the police force, but I know a good deal about stamps, and any knowledge I have is at your disposal.’

‘Thank you. And now there is much for me to do.’