A Murder of Quality (9 page)

Inspector William Rigby, himself a keen local historian, gave Smiley a somewhat terse prècis of Pylle’s legendary past as he drove cautiously along the snow-covered lanes.

‘These small, out-of-the-way villages are pretty strange places,’ he concluded. ‘Often only three or four families, all so inbred you can no more sort them out than a barnful of cats. That’s where your village idiots come from. They call it the Devil’s Mark; I call it incest. They hate to have them in the village, you know – they’ll drive them away at any price, like trying to wash away their shame, if you follow me.’

‘I follow you.’

‘This Jane’s the religious sort. There’s one or two of them turn that way. The villagers at Pylle are all Chapel now, see, so there’s been no use for King Arthur’s Church since Wesley. It’s empty, falling to bits. There’s a few from the valley go up to see it, for its history, like, but no one cares for it, or didn’t, not till Janie moved in.’

‘Moved in?’

‘Yes. She’s taken to cleaning the church out night and day, bringing in wild flowers and such. That’s why they say she’s a witch.’

They passed Rode’s house in silence and after turning a sharp bend began climbing the long steep hill that led to Pylle village. The snow in the lane was untouched and apart from occasional skidding they progressed without difficulty. The lower slopes of the hill were wooded, and the lane dark, until suddenly they emerged to find themselves on a smooth plateau, where a savage wind blew the fine snow like smoke across the fields, whipping it against the car. The snow had risen in drifts to one side of the lane, and the going became increasingly difficult.

Finally Rigby stopped the car and said:

‘We’ll walk from here, sir, if you don’t mind.’

‘How far is it?’

‘Short and sour, I’d say. That’s the village straight ahead.’

Through the windscreen, Smiley could discern behind the drifting veils of blown snow two low buildings about a quarter of a mile away. As he looked, a tall, muffled figure advanced towards them along the lane.

‘That’s Ted Mundy,’ said Rigby with satisfaction. ‘I told him to be here. He’s the sergeant from Okeford.’ He leaned out of the car window and called merrily:

‘Hullo, Ted there, you old buzzard, how be?’ Rigby opened the back door of the car and the sergeant climbed in. Smiley and Mundy were briefly introduced.

‘There’s a light in the church,’ said Mundy, ‘but I don’t know whether Janie’s there. I can’t ask no one in the village, see, or I’d have the whole lot round me. They thought she’d gone for good.’

‘Does she sleep there, then, Ted? She got a bed there or something?’ Rigby asked, and Smiley noticed with pleasure that his Dorset accent was more pronounced when he spoke to Mundy.

‘So they say, Bill. I couldn’t find no bed when I looked in there Saturday. But I tell you an odd thing, Bill. It seems Mrs Rode used to come up here sometimes, to the chapel, to see Janie.’

‘I heard about that,’ said Rigby shortly. ‘Now which way’s the church, Ted?’

‘Over the hill,’ said Mundy. ‘Outside the village, in a paddock.’ He turned to Smiley. ‘That’s quite common round here, sir, as I expect you know.’ Mundy spoke very slowly, choosing his words. ‘You see, when they had the plague they left their dead in the villages and moved away; not far though, on account of their land and the church. Terrible it was, terrible.’ Somehow Mundy managed to imply that the Black Death was a fairly recent disaster in those parts, if not actually within living memory.

They got out of the car, forcing the doors against the strong wind, and made their way towards the village, Mundy leading and Smiley in third place. The driven snow, fine and hard, stung their faces. It was an unearthly walk, high on that white hill on such a night. The curve of the bleak hill’s crest and the moaning of the wind, the snow cloud which sped across the moon, the dismal, unlit cottages so cautiously passed, belonged to another corner of the world.

Mundy led them sharply to the left, and Smiley guessed that by avoiding the centre of the village he hoped to escape the notice of its inhabitants. After about twenty minutes’ walking, often through deep snow, they found themselves following a low hedge between two fields. In the furthest corner of the right-hand field they saw a pale light glimmering across the snow, so pale that at first Smiley had to look away from it, then run his eyes back along the line of that distant hedge to make sure he was not deceived. Rigby stopped, beckoning to the others.

‘I’ll take over now,’ he said. He turned to Smiley. ‘I’d be obliged, sir, if you’d stand off a little. If there’s any trouble we don’t want you mixed up in it, do we?’

‘Of course.’

‘Ted Mundy, you come up by me.’

They followed the hedge until they came to a stile. Through the gap in the hedge they saw the church clearly now, a low building more like a tithe barn than a church. At one end a pale glow, like the uncertain light of a candle, shone dimly through the leaded windows.

‘She’s there,’ said Mundy, under his breath, as he and Rigby moved forward, Smiley following some distance behind.

They were crossing the field now, Rigby leading, and the church drawing ever closer. New sounds disturbed the moaning of the storm: the parched creak of a door, the mutter of a crumbling roof, the incessant sigh of wind upon a dying house. The two men in front of Smiley had stopped, almost in the shadow of the church wall, and were whispering together. Then Mundy walked quietly away, disappearing round the corner of the church. Rigby waited a moment, then approached the narrow entrance in the rear wall, and pushed the door.

It opened slowly, creaking painfully on its hinges. Then he disappeared into the church. Smiley was waiting outside when suddenly above all the sounds of night he heard a scream, so taut and shrill and clear that it seemed to have no source, but to ride everywhere upon the wind, to mount the ravaged sky on wings; and Smiley had a vision of Mad Janie as he had seen her earlier that night, and he heard again in her demented cry the dreadful note of madness. For a moment he waited. The echo died. Then slowly, terrified, he walked through the snow to the open doorway.

Two candles and an oil lamp on the bare altar shed a dim light over the tiny chapel. In front of the altar, on the sanctuary step, sat Jane, looking vaguely towards them. Her vacuous face was daubed with stains of green and blue, her filthy clothes were threaded with sprigs of evergreen and all about her on the floor were the bodies of small animals and birds.

The pews were similarly decorated with dead creatures of all kinds; and on the altar, broken twigs and little heaps of holly leaves. Between the candles stood a crudely fashioned cross. Stepping forward past Rigby, Smiley walked quickly down the aisle, past the lolling figure of Jane, until he stood before the altar. For a moment he hesitated, then turned and called softly to Rigby.

On the cross, draped over its three ends like a crude diadem, was a string of green beads.

8 Flowers for Stella

He woke with the echo of her scream in his ears. He had meant to sleep late, but his watch said half past seven. He put on his bedside lamp, for it was still half dark, and peered owlishly round the room. There were his trousers, flung over the chair, the legs still sodden from the snow. There were his shoes; he’d have to buy another pair. And there beside him were the notes he had made early that morning before going to sleep, transcriptions from memory of some of Mad Jane’s monologue on the journey back to Carne, a journey he would never forget. Mundy had sat with her in the back. She spoke to herself as a child does, asking questions and then, in the patient tones of an adult for whom the reply is self-evident, providing the answer.

One obsession seemed to fill her mind: she had seen the devil. She had seen him flying on the wind, his silver wings stretched out behind him. Sometimes the recollection amused her, sometimes inflated her with a sense of her own importance or beauty, and sometimes it terrified her, so that she moaned and wept and begged him to go away. Then Mundy would speak kindly to her, and try to calm her. Smiley wondered whether policemen grew accustomed to the squalor of such things, to clothes that were no more than stinking rags wound round wretched limbs, to puling imbeciles who clutched and screamed and wept. She must have been living on the run for nights on end, finding her food in the fields and dustbins since the night of the murder … What had she done that night? What had she seen? Had she killed Stella Rode? Had she seen the murderer, and fancied
him
to be the devil flying on the wind? Why should she think that? If Janie did not kill Stella Rode, what had she seen that so frightened her that for three long winter nights she prowled in terror like an animal in the forest? Had the devil within taken hold of Janie and given power to her arm as she struck down Stella? Was that the devil who rode upon the wind?

But the beads and the coat and the footprints which were not hers – what of them? He lay there thinking, and achieving nothing. At last it was time to get up: it was the morning of the funeral.

As he was getting out of bed the telephone rang. It was Rigby. His voice sounded strained and urgent. ‘I want to see you,’ he said. ‘Can you call round?’

‘Before or after the funeral?’

‘Before, if possible. What about now?’

‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

Rigby looked, for the first time since Smiley had met him, tired and worried.

‘It’s Mad Janie,’ he said. ‘The Chief thinks we should charge her.’

‘What for?’

‘Murder,’ Rigby replied crisply, pushing a thin file across the table. ‘The old fool’s made a statement … a sort of confession.’

They sat in silence while Smiley read the extraordinary statement. It was signed with Mad Janie’s mark – J. L. – drawn in a childish hand in letters an inch high. The constable who had taken it down had begun by trying to condense and simplify her account, but by the end of the first page he had obviously despaired. At last Smiley came to the description of the murder:

‘
So I tells my darling, I tells her: “You are a naughty creature to go with the devil,” but her did not hearken, see, and I took angry with her, but she paid no call. I can’t abide them as go with devils in the night, and I told her. She ought to have had holly, mister, there’s the truth. I told her, mister, but she never would hearken, and that’s all Janie’s saying, but she drove the devil off, Janie did, and there’s one will thank me, that’s my darling and I took her jewels for the saints I did, to pretty out the church, and a coat for to keep me warm
.’

Rigby watched him as he slowly replaced the statement on the desk.

‘Well, what do you think of it?’

Smiley hesitated. ‘It’s pretty good nonsense as it stands,’ he replied at last.

‘Of course it is,’ said Rigby, with something like contempt. ‘She saw something, Lord knows what, when she was out on the prowl; stealing, I shouldn’t wonder. She may have robbed the body, or else she picked up the beads where the murderer dropped them. We’ve traced the coat. Belonged to a Mr Jardine, a baker in Carne East. Mrs Jardine gave it to Stella Rode last Wednesday morning for the refugees. Janie must have pinched it from the conservatory. That’s what she meant by “a coat for to keep me warm”. But she no more killed Stella Rode than you or I did. What about the footprints, the glove-marks in the conservatory? Besides, she’s not strong enough, Janie isn’t, to heave that poor woman forty feet through the snow. This is a man’s work, as anyone can see.’

‘Then what exactly …?’

‘We’ve called off the search, and I’m to prepare a case against one Jane Lyn of the village of Pylle for the wilful murder of Stella Rode. I wanted to tell you myself before you read it all over the papers. So that you’d know how it was.’

‘Thanks.’

‘In the meantime, if there’s any help I can give you, we’re still willing.’ He hesitated, seemed about to say something, then to change his mind.

As he made his way down the wide staircase Smiley felt useless and very angry, which was scarcely the right frame of mind in which to attend a funeral.

It was an admirably conducted affair. Neither the flowers nor the congregation exceeded what was fitting to the occasion. She was not buried at the Abbey, out of deference perhaps to her simplicity of taste, but in the parish churchyard not far from North Fields. The Master was detained that day, as he was on most days, and had sent instead his wife, a small, very vague woman who had spent a long time in India. D’Arcy was much in evidence, fluttering here and there before the ceremony like an anxious beadle; and Mr Cardew had come to guide poor Stella through the unfamiliarities of High Anglican procedure. The Hechts were there, Charles all in black, scrubbed and shining, and Shane in dramatic weeds, and a hat with a very broad brim.

Smiley, who, like the others, had arrived early in anticipation of the unwholesome public interest which the ceremony might arouse, found himself a seat near the entrance of the church. He watched each new arrival with interest, waiting for his first sight of Stanley Rode.

Several tradesmen arrived, pressed into bulging serge and black ties, and formed a small group south of the aisle, away from the staff and their wives. Soon they were joined by other members of the town community, women who had known Mrs Rode at the Tabernacle; and then by Rigby, who looked straight at Smiley and gave no sign. Then on the stroke of three a tall old man walked slowly through the doorway, looking straight before him, neither knowing nor seeing anyone. Beside him was Stanley Rode.

It was a face which at first sight meant nothing to Smiley, seeming to have neither the imprint of temperament nor the components of character; it was a shallow, ordinary face, inclining to plumpness, and lacking quality. It matched his short, ordinary body and his black, ordinary hair; it was suitably compressed into an expression of sorrow. As Smiley watched him turn into the centre aisle and take his place among the principal mourners, it occurred to him that Rode’s very walk and bearing successfully conveyed something entirely alien to Carne. If it is vulgar to wear a pen in the breast pocket of your jacket, to favour Fair Isle pullovers and brown ties, to bob a little and turn your feet out as you walk, then Rode beyond a shadow of doubt was vulgar, for though he did not now commit these sins, his manner implied them all.