Blood on the Wood (25 page)

‘I'm lodging with Mrs Penny,' I said. ‘I heard a noise so I thought I'd better come down and see what was happening.'

They relaxed, relieved I was accounted for.

‘I'm sorry you've had your sleep broken, miss,' the landlord said, ‘but there's nothing for you to worry about. Just a ruffian trying to push himself in where he's not wanted.'

‘A local man?'

A general shaking of heads. I was being nosy, but perhaps they were used to that from hikers and cyclists. They didn't seem to resent it.

‘Was he by any chance a big tall man with a beard?'

‘Why, are you looking for one of they?'

That from a man in the doorway who seemed more drunk than the rest. They shushed him.

‘No,' the landlord said. ‘Broad in the shoulder but not big out of the common and no beard. Stubble, but no beard.'

Not Harry Hawthorne, then. Even if he'd shaved off his beard he couldn't change his size. I asked what he'd done to get banned from the pub.

‘He's got a nasty temper,' the landlord said. It set off a chorus from the others.

‘And he keeps trying to cadge drinks off people.'

‘Stole me drink once, he did, nearly whole pint left there was.'

‘That's right, pinches people's pints off the bar when he thinks they're not looking, then starts a fight when you pick him up on it.'

‘And keeps on about people owing him money.'

More to keep the conversation going than anything, I picked up on the last remark. ‘One of these men owed a fortune, is he?' I asked.

‘Don't know about a fortune, miss. Time I heard it, it was twenty pounds.'

The others chorused that was right, supposed to be twenty pounds. They were fidgeting now, night air cold and bladders full probably, wanting the conversation to end. I wished them good night and they drifted away up and down the street. The landlord hoped I'd sleep better now all that was over and went back inside. I let myself into the house opposite and locked the door behind me. Mrs Penny was still snoring in her room. With luck, she might not know about my nocturnal gallivanting, but villages being villages I couldn't depend on that. Anyway, there was something else bothering me more. The man had been quite specific, several times over, about the amount he was owed – twenty pounds. Consistency was unusual in a violent drunk. The sum was unusual too. If a man of that kind thinks he's owed money it's either a modest shilling for the next drink or untold thousands he should have inherited and didn't. Twenty pounds was either too big or too small for the pattern. I undressed again, got under the sheets and blankets, and slept.

Some time later, while it was still dark, I was suddenly broad awake again because I'd remembered when I'd last heard of somebody wanting twenty pounds. Daniel Venn had told me: ‘…
he said I could have her for twenty pounds'.
The price of Daisy.

Chapter Fifteen

‘S
ERVE HIM RIGHT
,'
MRS PENNY SAID
when I told her I'd heard a man being thrown out of the Crown. ‘Tramp, probably. We get more of those than a dog has fleas.'

I hadn't slept much and was up and dressed by six, but she and her cat were in the kitchen before me. She poured me a cup of tea, spread a hunk of farmhouse loaf with butter and put an egg on to boil.

‘There's no bacon on account of Bestley's foot. Swollen up purple and yellow.' She went into a lot of medical details involving the probability of gangrene, delirium and amputation.

I ate my egg and walked out to the village street. It was a fine morning, a smell of fresh bread and ripe apples over everything, swallows twittering around and getting ready to migrate. I spoke to a couple of farm labourers on their way to work, a woman scrubbing her front step, a man delivering bread from a pony cart. They'd all of them seen tramps around over the past few weeks, but there was nothing unusual about that. A lot of them had their familiar rounds, going from workhouse to workhouse, picking up the occasional odd job or piece of charity in between. But they hadn't noticed anything unusual in the way of tramps in the last day or two and my description – broad shoulders, stubble, average build – could have applied to almost any of them. Later, when the shop-cum-post-office opened I took my place in the queue. It was only the size of a small parlour and with half of it taken up by the counter and a woman and man in front of me I could just about wedge into the corner beside the broom handles and scrubbing boards.

The woman at the counter was weighing out two ounces of tea, carefully and slowly, for an old dear who was saying that girls who got killed probably did something to deserve it. The man gave his opinion that it was probably some of them anthiests from Manchester. It took me a while to realise he was talking about the Scipian camp, presumably merging atheists and anarchists in general suspicion. He'd come to collect some boots that had gone to town for mending, but was disappointed. Bestley's foot again. It seemed to be having a disastrous effect on the village economy. The name struck a chord and I remembered that Mr Bestley was the village carter who'd taken the cabinet up to the Venns' house. When it came to my turn I bought a pair of bootlaces and a packet of chocolate. As it seemed to be the local custom I enquired after Bestley's foot and was told he'd dropped a hammer on it last week. After more chat about the weather and hiking I mentioned that I was staying with Mrs Penny and there'd been a bit of trouble outside the Crown last night. The shopkeeper was inclined to resent it at first as a slur on the village. (Murder, it seemed, was acceptable but public house fights might lower the tone of a place.)

‘I think the troublemaker was an outsider,' I said. ‘He didn't sound like a local man.'

‘We've had a lot of those around in the past couple of weeks.'

I hadn't understood till then how the Scipian camp had been resented. The rumours of what was going on up there had been bad enough, but entertaining at least. The worst of it was that the Scipians had spent very little money in the village at the shop, pub or bakery. So, as the village saw it, the Scipians got all the sin and the locals got none of the profits. I might have explained that the camp, from what I'd seen of it, had been as virtuous as a Sunday school outing and if the Scipians hadn't spent money it was because they hadn't got much. But I just said the man hadn't sounded like one of those to me.

‘There are tramps about,' the woman behind the counter said. ‘One of them got a chicken of ours two nights ago. Johnson tried to make out it was a fox. I said, don't you give me fox. What fox you ever heard of could unlatch a coop and take a hen out of it without fuss or feathers?'

This sounded more promising. If Fardel had been in the area nine or ten days without money, he'd have to eat.

‘Is Mr Johnson your husband?'

She made a derisive noise. ‘No, thank God. Constable Johnson at the police house.'

Inspector Bull had brought his own constable with him from outside. There'd been no mention of a Constable Johnson. I paid for my things and asked where the police house was.

‘The other side of the school. You'll know it from the dahlias.'

She was right. The lower floor of the little stone cottage was almost hidden by a breaking wave of reds and yellows and purples. Above the front door, just visible, a new stone plaque with the county arms was the only sign that this was the law's residence. Among the flowers, a red-faced man in his fifties straightened up and looked at me. He was in waistcoat and shirtsleeves and holding a flowerpot stuffed with straw. I wished him good afternoon and said I was staying in the village, a friend of the Venn family. His face clouded.

‘I'm sorry for what's happened to them, miss. Mrs Venn's always been good to the village.'

‘The old Mrs Venn or the young one?'

‘Both, miss.'

My guess that the village policeman had little if anything to do with the murder investigation seemed right. I admired his dahlias and he invited me in through the gate to see them. Earwigs were a pest, he said. His big red fist jerked the straw out of the flowerpot into a bucket of water on the path. Earwigs burst out of it into the water, rowing uselessly with hundreds of legs. Again, I mentioned the trouble outside the Crown. He'd heard about it, no more. As for tramps, he knew most of the regulars in his area and thought them harmless on the whole. No new ones had come to his notice over the past couple of weeks.

‘The woman at the shop thinks a tramp stole one of her chickens,' I said.

His expression showed what he thought of the woman at the shop. His big hand hovered over a yellow explosion of bloom, delicately twitched off a single petal, earwig-nibbled.

‘Drive you mad it would, sometimes. I retire with a pension this time next year and it can't come a day too soon for me. They all want you to find their dogs or their chickens or their wives and it's you they blame if you can't, not whoever it is who went off with their wives or their dogs or their chickens in the first place.'

‘You count wives along with the rest of the livestock?' I was annoyed but luckily he didn't realise that.

‘You don't, that's what I have to explain to them. A chicken or a dog or a horse, that's your possession and if somebody takes it, he's committed an offence. It's not the same with a wife. Like it or not, she's a free person in law and if she decides to take herself off of her own free will or go off with somebody else, you can't send a policeman to fetch her back. You might not like it, but that's the law.'

From the way he said it, I guessed he'd made that little speech recently to somebody else. Come to think of it, I'd heard a bit of gossip recently about a man's wife leaving him.

‘Mr Sutton the woodworker?'

Carol Venn had mentioned it. He nodded and turned back to his flowers, dutifully unwilling to talk about a particular case. I thanked him, said I hoped the frost would come late this year for the sake of his dahlias and went back to the main street to go on with the discouraging search. I went up and down in the morning sun, talking to women standing at open doors, old men gossiping by the pump. One man had seen a dark figure slinking into a copse around twilight about a week ago – but he couldn't remember when exactly, only saw him from a field away and thought he was probably a poacher. Apart from that, nothing.

I went on to the end of the street and stopped outside the furniture workshop. A lad was out in the yard, stacking pieces of seasoned oak. Through a window open to the street I could see Mr Sutton leaning over, planing something. I hesitated to bother him but although he had his back to me he must have sensed that I was there. He whirled round with such a look of hope on his face that I thought he must be seeing somebody behind me. But there was nobody. The hope died away and his face crumpled like a kicked paper lantern. The plane clattered to the floor. By the time I got inside he was kneeling down in the pale wood shavings, head bent, forehead against the wood he'd been planing.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I wasn't meaning to spy on you.'

There was nobody else in the workshop.

‘Janie,' he said, to the wood, not to me. It came out as the kind of groan tree branches make, rubbing against each other in a gale. ‘Every time there's someone there, I think it's Janie.' He levered himself upright and sat down on a block of wood. ‘She's been gone more than a week now.'

‘I'm sorry.'

He looked at me, as if he couldn't get me or anything else into focus. ‘You're Mrs Venn's friend, aren't you? You were there that day it started.'

‘What started?'

‘That cabinet. I've never liked black oak, never liked it. Poor Janie was so scared of it. You saw that?'

She'd been scared, no doubt about it, but looking back I wasn't sure if it had been of the cabinet itself. But I said nothing because he was in such a tightly stretched state of nerves it looked as if even the slightest extra strain would spring him apart. He looked as if he hadn't slept for days and his hands were shaking so much it was surprising he could operate the plane.

‘And then the two of them singing that song, about a baby being tormented and a woman killed. How could anybody sing a song like that? There was a curse on the thing. I should never have let it in the workshop. I'd have burned it to ashes in the yard if I'd known, damn whether it was valuable or not.'

‘A curse on the cabinet?'

‘Why not? You can build love into a piece of furniture, I know that because I've done it. If you can build love in you can build hate as well. Somebody carved that thing with hate in his hands. If I had him here…'

He jumped up, grabbed a chisel from a bench and started tearing jagged runnels into the piece of wood he'd been planing, ugly and random. The torn wood looked terribly like flesh drawing back from the edges of a wound. Tears were running down his face. ‘They say the poor girl was in it, actually inside it. Is that true?'

I nodded. He stared at the slashes in the wood as if somebody else had made them and came back to sit down.

‘At least her family knows what's become of her. I might never know what's happened to Janie or the baby. Just gone off, that fool of a policeman says. Women just go off and you can't do anything about it. Janie wasn't like that. Where would she go? Who would she go to?'

‘Can you think of any reason why she'd go?'

He looked away, going red. ‘Are people gossiping then?'

‘If they are, I haven't heard any.'

‘I'd done no harm to her. She was happy with the baby and we had a good roof over our heads. Mrs Venn had set us up nicely so I could do the work I always wanted to do. We had everything to look forward to, then like a fool I let that black oak in my shop.'

‘When did she go?'

‘The Monday. She got me my breakfast as usual. I had to get that damned – excuse me – the cabinet up to the house, then go on over Chadlington way to see a customer. When I got back in the afternoon, she'd gone.'