Enter Pale Death (35 page)

“No, it’s not that, sir. What sort of a plodding idiot do you take me for?” Gravely, Hunnyton took Goodfellow’s letter from his pocketbook and handed it to Joe. “The victim names you, sir.”

“What are you talking about?” Joe looked again at the folded note addressed to “Sandilands.”

Reciting from memory of the text, Hunnyton said quietly, “
Your Lord and Master
, he says—Truelove we’re assuming—
got his London lawyer to evict me … Even sent one of his tame police bully-boys to make sure I go quietly. At least I merited an Assistant Commissioner from the Yard!
” Not exactly
quietly
perhaps. His final departure was accompanied by the blast of a shotgun heard for miles around.”

“Truelove’s tame police bully-boy?” Joe’s anger was rising. “Is that how
you
would characterise me?”

“Not me, sir. Those are the dead man’s words. I’ve only observed you doing Sir James’s shopping for him. A judge might want to enquire into any previous association you might have had with the gentleman. He might go so far as to check the log book of your encounters at Scotland Yard. How many was it? Two? In the days before the murder … Oh, dear. Your secretary was present at the time? No? Pity …”

Joe’s mouth was too dry to form the words to express his thoughts even if his shocked brain had been able to come up with some. He maintained his rigid stance, unable to contemplate the alternative of knocking Hunnyton to the ground.

“Sir! Sir! Calm down!” Hunnyton urged, sensing a coming explosion. “Always better to look the truth in the face, I reckon. We’re professionals. We know how this works. We’ve both seen things turn very nasty in court. Some young terrier of a prosecuting council trying to make his name is all it takes. The Press love a touch of hubris as much as they hate Scotland Yard. A combination will have them salivating into their mild and bitters. A top man, war hero and one-time debs’ delight being hanged by the rope he’s knotted himself—they’d love it! There’s a way through. Clear and obvious as a turnpike. Just slip that letter I’ve given you in your pocket and bugger off. I never saw it. Leave me to finish here.”

He fixed Joe at last with unclouded eyes. Angry eyes. “Listen! This piece of shit flushed himself out of our lives. Not right that he should take anybody down the pan with him. Not anybody! I won’t allow it. Got that? I’m telling you formally, Assistant Commissioner, that I’m scaling down the inquiry. I’ll turn the men round sharpish when they get here. A few photos and signed statements from the lads—I’m not risking any charge of collusion—should do it.”

He drew himself up, every inch the officer reporting to his superior. “False alarm, sir. Sorry you’ve been bothered. This is a suicide we’re looking at. No one else is being sought in connection with the death.”

Joe took his leave of Hunnyton, murmuring the official formulae. He even caught himself muttering, “Carry on, Superintendent.”

He’d wondered if he’d recognise the moment. Here it was: the moment when, charmed, distracted and trusting, he’d feel the saddle slap down across his back.

Still stunned and abstracted, his mind whirling, he answered the question Hunnyton fired at him as he left the room: “Where am I going? Oh, not far.” And, with a last rebellious kick of the heels: “I think it’s time to hear from Phoebe herself.”

H
E REACHED THE
grave as the church clock struck half past nine. His witness was already there in the remotest corner of the deserted churchyard, head down, occupied in tending the simple grave.

Joe came up and knelt down alongside. “White roses were her favourite flower, I take it?”

“Anything white, she loved. Summertime’s easy but it’s a bit difficult in the winter to come up with something. I usually manage with snowberries and ivy until the snowdrops come out and then there’s the paper-white narcissi. It’s a lonely site they found for her. I wouldn’t like her to think she’d been forgotten.”

She didn’t seem in the slightest way put out to see him there. “She was murdered, little Phoebe. I suppose you’ve worked that out.”

“I have and I know the name of the killer, Mrs. Bolton. I’m equally sure that you also know and have known for years. The puzzle for me is why you’ve chosen to keep silent and let a great injustice fester.”

She looked down at the grave in shame and anger, words failing her. This was not the accusation she had been prepared for.

“Nothing to say? Why don’t you give me Phoebe’s own words, Mrs. B.? It’s time we heard from her. Can you remember the last thing she confided to you?”

“She wasn’t in her right mind. Mad with the worry. I’d guessed her condition. She was directly in my charge. There wasn’t much about Phoebe I didn’t know. Even so—I hadn’t realised who’d got her into trouble. It could have been any of the footmen—they’re always first on the suspect list—but for me: I’d feared the ghastly
Goodfellow, so firmly under Sir Sidney’s protection. It was unreasonable that. The old master just brushed any complaints aside. I think he probably put up with it because Goodfellow had something on him—something he’d done in his army years that he wouldn’t have wanted mistress Cecily to hear about.

“Goodfellow was always too interested in the maids. They had to walk miles to get around him. He was always tracking them about the place, leering out from the shrubbery. Phoebe was the one who really caught his eye. Pretty as a picture but soft and unresisting. She would never have given him a kick in the privates as the other maids did. As I directed them to do.

“But her last words to me? Full of sorrow. She talked of Adam. ‘He’s never going to come for me, is he, Enid? I’m going to throw myself off the roof and then he’ll be sorry.’

“I told her to hold on—Adam would be down from Cambridge any minute. He’d sort things out for her. He was a good lad, Adam, and he’d understand if anyone did. Only eighteen at the time but a big husky lad with a good head on him and a sense of … would ‘righteousness’ sound old-fashioned? He’d take whoever had wronged her and beat him to a pulp.”

“She wasn’t reassured?”

“No. I’d said the wrong thing, judging by her outburst. ‘No, he mustn’t! He couldn’t! We’d all of us suffer for it!’ She was genuinely aghast.”

“That’s when the penny dropped?”

“Yes. The only man who could make the whole staff suffer was: the master.”

“Sir Sidney up to his old tricks?”

“With his wife pregnant again, we wouldn’t have been surprised. I charged Phoebe with my suspicions. She denied it with such amazement and horror I could only believe she was telling the truth.”

“Tinkle, tinkle went the second penny?” Joe suggested.

Enid Bolton nodded. “James! He was such a lad! Firing off his pop gun and mooching about the place looking unhappy. All long limbs and spots. But then I thought: he’s actually nearly the same age as Phoebe. I asked her.”

“And she admitted it?”

“Yes. She hadn’t feared him or what he was capable of, you see. She did out his room in the morning, turned down his sheets at night … and there was I, juggling the duties, carefully distancing her from his
father
’s lair! She went out into the woods with him on her afternoon off, helping him with his traps. Playtime, I’m sure she thought was what was going on. She liked company her own age who could make her laugh. And James Truelove has always been able to make a girl laugh. His little sisters adored him—still do. I think Phoebe was genuinely fond of him. That’s always been his gift. From the day he was born, he’s expected to be loved.”

“They were probably observed by Goodfellow, the resident snake-in-the-grass.”

“Another opportunity for blackmail and extortion. Unto the next generation.”

Joe asked the next question with care: “Do you think James Truelove drowned her in the moat?”

“No. I believe she was killed. Deliberately held under. But not by James. I don’t make this assertion on a basis of character. I was the one who laid out her body, you see, sir.” The calm features seemed suddenly to crumple in sorrow. “She had no one else. Drunken mother, father left home years before. She looked on me as family—her auntie perhaps. I wasn’t going to leave her to the ministrations of frightful old Bella in the village with her dirty fingernails.”

“No police to take charge?”

“Not in those days. A quick resolution was all everybody wanted. Sir Sidney made all the arrangements. Even the Chief Constable did as he was told by Sir Sidney.”

“What did you notice about the state of the body?”

“That she was about three months pregnant and just beginning to show. It was the ankles that told me what I wanted to know. There was a circlet of bruises where no bruising should have been. He’d grabbed her by the ankles and yanked them upwards, pushing her face under the water.”

“He?”

“Goodfellow, of course. He had the gall to say he’d found her body. They tell me it’s often the one who discovers the crime who did it. But you will know better than I. One of the footmen was crossing the drawbridge at the time he raised the alarm. Albert could swim and he leapt in and helped Goodfellow pull her out.”

“Either one of them could have tugged her by the ankles to draw her to the side?”

“I checked. I asked the footman to show me exactly how they’d handled the body. No one touched her ankles. Albert confided that he could have sworn that Goodfellow was already wet before he jumped in.”

Joe let out a sound like a kettle coming to the boil. “Sheeesh! Even Inspector Lestrade would have sorted this one out in ten minutes! If he’d been alerted!” He calmed himself to ask, “Did you find anything unusual when you tidied out her room?”

“You assume—rightly—that I took responsibility for doing that myself. Yes, I did. I found a ten-pound money order in her drawer. Six months’ wages! Only one way she could have come by such a sum, and one purpose. I worked it out. I said nothing. Just gave it to the Reverend Easterby for the church orphanage.”

“Which brings me back to my original question, Mrs. Bolton. Saying nothing?”

Anger flashed and the features were suddenly stern again. “Why don’t you answer your own impertinent questions? You seem to have all the answers you want stuffed up your sleeve!
You’re not interested in hearing what I have to say. You just want me to confirm your suspicions.”

Joe flinched and waited in silence.

“I’m a good person, Commissioner. I try my best always to think of others and not my own personal satisfaction. I think things through. I’m sure you do too and know what I’m about to say. It would have been easy to shout and point accusing fingers and call upon the police, the vicar, Sir Sidney. The best I could have hoped for was that I should be believed. And that would have brought about the very worst reaction. If Adam Hunnybun had found out for certain that James had ruined the girl he loved, retribution would have followed. That’s the sort of man he is. No one crosses Adam. He would have killed James
and
Goodfellow, handed himself in, been found guilty and gone to the gallows smiling. The Trueloves would have been publicly disgraced by association. The family was on its uppers at the time. An event of this nature would have sunk the boat. A whole household of servants as well as owners would have been cut loose to seek work elsewhere in a county that could offer them none. Farms and great houses were being sold off, businesses going bankrupt, staff being turned off the land every day. Not as bad as things are today, but bad enough. I looked about me and decided that these were people and this was a situation worth saving. I swallowed my outrage, my pride, even my craving for justice and kept silent. Phoebe would have understood.”

“What were your feelings when Mr. Styles gave you the news that the villain had shot his own head off?”

“Relief and gratitude, followed by guilt that I should have such unchristian feelings. But I don’t wallow in vengeance. I agree with the poet Juvenal, who tells us that revenge is the pleasure of a tiny and feeble mind. A rather unexpected sentiment for a Roman but he has many wise things to say. In my long years, I’ve never observed that satisfaction in revenge grows with time. It
diminishes over the years, like all painful emotions, to an embarrassing twinge of memory. A momentary dyspepsia of the spirit. I get on with life, sir. Doing my best for the family and my fellows. Retribution I leave to a Higher Authority who is not obliged to suffer the consequences here below.”

Joe watched as she put the remaining flowers in place, making a few adjustments to the display. The craving for revenge may have been blunted by time with the housekeeper but love and concern for the wronged was shining as bright as ever, he reckoned. He looked with understanding at the sad, wise face and found that he had, unconsciously, repeated Hunnyton’s gesture at the graveside, placing the palm of his hand flat to the mound of earth that covered Phoebe and her child. Making contact. Making some sort of a vow.

“Tell me, Mrs. Bolton,” he said in a tone he might have used to address the goddess of wisdom at her altar, “are people born with the seeds of evil in their souls? Is it their inborn qualities that push them into dark acts? Are they ever open to the influences of priests or policemen? Are the Reverend Easterby and I struggling against impossible forces of Nature?”

Her eyes widened, her lips quivered. “Lord! You don’t want to know much, do you! Whatever’s next? How do I get my strawberry jam to set?”

Sobered by Joe’s crestfallen expression, Mrs. Bolton added quietly: “We all have inner qualities that dispose us towards good or evil to some degree. But sometimes—I’d say, most times—it’s external, social or family reasons, that push a man or a woman to kill. The most admirable of us will wield a gun or a knife in defence of—or for the promotion of—his nearest and dearest or his country. You have been a soldier. You of all men understand that. As a policeman, you have chosen to continue to follow in the trails of violence and lawlessness. Seeking to understand? Or fascinated by it? You know the answer, Commissioner.”

“Lemon pips!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The answer to your question. My mother swears by lemon pips. Something to do with pectin I believe. She makes the best-set jam north of the Border. You see, I’ve guessed your secret, Mrs. B.”