Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 (7 page)

The first face I saw was the dour verger’s. Then Edmund’s swam into view.

“Stay where you are, Tobias. You have taken a rare beating. It is only thanks to Mr. Weller here that you escaped worse. He saw you lying in a ditch and gathered you up and brought you here to his own home.”

I managed to frame a few words of gratitude. “Titus? My horse, Mr. Weller?”

“Long gone. Run off. Stolen. Who knows?”

I could not hold back a deep groan. Titus and I were old friends—I had depended on him to take me to deathbeds and weddings alike.

“And I am come to take you home to Langley Park, where Maria is even now preparing you a bed. I don’t think any bones are broken, my young friend, but you are as bruised as if you had taken on the great Cribb himself. Let me help you into the fresh garments I have brought for you.”

Even as I pulled on my breeches—an agonising task—I heard a commotion outside the cottage. Against the low drone of the verger’s protests, a man’s voice rose in desperation and anger. Edmund went out to see what the matter was, returning long-faced.

“Here’s a pretty pickle. I have one patient who should be conveyed as swiftly as possible to his sickbed, and I have another who has been brought to bed of a child and is likely to die. Can you remain here, Tobias, awhile longer, if Mr. Weller permits?”

I forced my arms into my coat. “Indeed I cannot stay here. My place is with you and the dying woman, Edmund, as well you must know. If you would be kind enough to lend me an arm—and you, Mr. Weller, if you please—then I can pray while you heal.”

The wretched young man likely to lose his wife and his son was distraught twice over, weeping that his son would die unbaptised. I sent him reluctant but hot-foot to the church, for holy water and wine and wafer. His son would be baptised and his wife receive the Sacrament on her deathbed.

“So both live? Edmund, what a miracle! But Tobias should be in bed—no arguments now.”

I could not argue. Nor could I tell how long I slept.

There was no sign of Hansard when I awoke to find Maria sponging my face and hands with lavender water.

“Edmund left these drops for you,” she said, “Only think, he has already been summoned to Ewen Court to treat one of the gentlemen there. How wonderful it would be if he became their regular medical man.”

“It would indeed,” I agreed. Idly I wondered who needed his ministrations; I also wondered if he had been admitted to the front door, or if, like many a country doctor, had been forced to present himself at the servants’ entrance.

Voices downstairs and a tap at my chamber door took Maria from my side. In her absence I resumed my drowsing state, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, dimly aware that whoever attacked me must have been provoked by our questions.

Edmund returned home with a huge basket of fruit from Lord Ewen’s succession-houses and an even larger smile. “You’ll never guess who my patient was,” he said gleefully, his enthusiasm distracting me as he embarked on the painful process of replacing my various bandages. “Lord Hartland himself! Yes, of course—the gout. I prescribed for him a lowering diet and perhaps a sojourn in Bath, where you might do well to accompany him to allow those bruises to heal. The inner ones, Tobias, as well as the outer ones. But perhaps you are two men who will always love each other more when you do not have to rub along cheek by jowl. Certainly neither of you is in any position to visit the other at the moment. Almost done—hold still awhile longer! But he wants above all to hand over your assailants to the justices. Like you, he believes Dr. Coates would be well placed to know the cause of all the unhappiness in the village, and has promised to locate him.”

“My father has friends in many of the embassies in Europe,” I said. “If anyone could run the man to earth, it is he. Thank you, Edmund, I am much more comfortable now.”

“You lie, of course,” he said cheerfully. “The pain may get worse before it gets better. But there is good news. Titus found his way back to his stable, safe and sound. And now I am off to Clavercote to see how my other patients do.”

Soon I was able to sit in a sunny corner of the Hansards’ terrace, absorbing the healing rays of a suddenly benign sun, which greened the hitherto joyless browns of the fields and promised a future of plenty—at least to those who still had unenclosed land to farm. Edmund wanted me to rest. But I insisted I needed to make three journeys—to my own dear church and to All Saints, to take divine service in each, and then to Ewen Court, to pay my respects to my father and thank him for his endeavours on my behalf.

Once again he surprised me by not asking for the latest news of our investigations.

“These strange potions this quack friend of yours insists I drink—will they kill me, do you think?” he demanded the moment I entered his chamber.

“If they are herbal remedies, based on the folklore round here, then you should obey to the letter his instructions,” I said cautiously. “Just because they are derived from innocent-looking flowers does not mean that they are harmless. But—in the quantities he recommends—are they doing you good?”

He surveyed his foot balefully. “He says himself he doesn’t know if it’s the plain regimen he insists I follow or the tinctures that are doing me good. Seems a decent enough fellow, Tobias.”

“He is. He has the most charming wife, too, possessed of true elegance of mind and person.”

“You are telling me this because there’s something you don’t want me to know,” he growled, looking at me from under his eyebrows. “Admit it!”

“I do indeed,” I said, not knowing whether to be pleased by this sudden allusion to the way he had always dealt with my childhood peccadilloes. “But it is not my secret I would betray if I told it.”

“Oh, everyone’s told me he married his doxy of a housekeeper—”

“Then everyone has misled you, sir. He married a lady who was someone else’s housekeeper—and was far more intelligent and learned than those who employed her. Indeed, it is she who introduced Edmund to many of the simple remedies he now employs. When you do me the honour of dining at the rectory, sir,” I pressed on bravely, “you will have the chance to meet them—for I would not invite the one without the other. And if Mama happened to be of the party, I would say no different.”

He looked suddenly furtive. “Your mother must know nothing of this, do you hear?” He pointed at his foot. “Or I shall never again have peace in my own home.”

We exchanged a smile: This was the first time we had ever entered such a conspiracy together.

Edmund’s other patients continued to do well. In due course, I was able to church the mother, having must needs baptised her first, Dr. Coates never having formally welcomed her into the church. Edmund and Maria sponsored her, Edmund regarding with covert concern the two frail men, her father and father-in-law, who accompanied her and her husband to the font. One was detailed to hold the lusty babe, who had had a much less formal baptism, but Maria soon seized him, for safety’s sake as much as anything else.

After the ceremony, the two old men hung back. And for the most solemn reason. They wanted to confess to Edmund and me that they had committed the vile murder and crucifixion. Along with horror, my first impulse was to laugh. How could these two living skeletons have overpowered such a powerful specimen? They insisted that they had acted in concert, to kill a vagrant who had in some unspecified way insulted them. Despite our questioning, they would say no more. So, in his capacity as justice of the peace, Edmund was bound to have them confined in the local lockup, a poor affair of but three pitiful rooms—two cells and the jailer’s office.

Justice soon took its course. They were found guilty after the most perfunctory of trials and condemned to death within the week. Privately, Edmund doubted whether the elder would survive to take his punishment.

Since the lockup could not provide the men with more than the most rudimentary sustenance, I was permitted to take food with me when I visited them each day to preach the Gospel and assure them of the forgiveness of sins.

I was not the only visitor, nor the only provider of food. On their last day, several of the womenfolk of the village came to say their farewells, bearing pies and a cake, so small the jailer made a sad jest about it not being big enough to contain a file.

So tender were their final embraces I could scarce forbear to weep. At last we all wended our way home; only Edmund and I could promise to be there to accompany them on their final earthly journey.

“Dead!” I had repeated, staggering back as the jailer broke the astonishing news. “What? Both dead?”

He had nodded, equally amazed. “You may see for yourself, Mr. Campion. There they lie, with as sweet smiles on their faces as if they had never done the dreadful deed for which they stood condemned.”

“But which, I am as sure as I am sitting beside you in this chaise, Tobias,” Edmund confided, as we returned to Langley Park, “they did not commit. When I anatomise them—and I promised it would be me and no other, remember—I am sure I will find signs of mortal illness in both. They were dying, Tobias, and knew it. They confessed—mark my words—to protect someone else.”

“But surely it is more than coincidence that they both died the night before they were to be hanged!”

“No coincidence at all. I can only surmise what was in those pies and cakes. And surmise, too, who put it in. There must have been half a dozen women bidding them goodbye, and others outside the jail. How can we bring them all to justice? Or any of them? Now, I intended to call on your father, while we are so close to Ewen Court: Will you accompany me?”

“This Reverend Dr. Nathaniel Coates of yours,” my father greeted us, “has not presented himself at any of our embassies in Europe, nor is he known by reputation. I tell you straight, gentlemen, there’s something havey-cavey about this vicar of yours. As Lord Wychbold here avers.”

The aged earl had ridden over to greet Lord Ewen and his guest and now sat with my father, an old political ally.

“I fear that in my youth I did great wrong, gentlemen,” he said. “But I repented and changed my ways. So imagine how I felt when none other than a man of the cloth invited me to join him in the most nefarious debauchery. It is my opinion and that of Hartland, here, that Dr. Coates never fulfilled his aim of escaping to the Continent. The wronged villagers must have got wind of his plans and decided to make his journey from this place his last.”

I frowned. “Surely they would do so secretly? And dispose of his body where it might never have been found?”

“Who knows what anger his regular betrayals of village maidens—aye, and some young men too!—may have caused? Anger that drives the perpetrator beyond common sense. Anger that wished you dead, Mr. Campion. Anger that quailed in the face of your kindness to sick strangers when you were so ill yourself.”

“So those two poor old men may have put themselves forward as
soi-disant
murderers,” my father mused, “in order to protect other men.”

“My theory exactly,” Edmund declared. “And what the men started, the women completed. Human justice has prevailed, even if state justice was gulled.” He stroked his chin. “I must ask my dear wife if she has any idea what herbs they employed.”

“I will be pleased to hear the answer myself,” my father said. “I propose to dine at this rectory of his before I return to Derbyshire. Young Tobias is such a scatterbrain he may well have engaged a cook who cannot distinguish culinary herbs from those with—let us say—a deeply soporific effect, and undoubtedly we need your expertise: yours and Mrs. Hansard’s, if you please.”

And to my joy we exchanged a second conspiratorial smile.

Copyright © 2011 by Judith Cutler

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Fiction

The Man Who Took His Hat Off to the Driver of the Train

by Peter Turnbull

George Hennessey of the York P.D. is back in another involving short case. If you’d like to see him in a longer work, the latest Hennessey and Yellich novel,
Deliver Us From Evil,
becomes available in paperback this month; it was first published in hardcover in June 2010 by Severn House. “Throughout this long-running series,” said
Booklist
in reviewing the novel, “Turnbull has delivered engaging writing, involving plots, memorable characters, and realistic descriptions of police work.”

Over the years the story of the man who took his hat off to the driver of the train grew to have three parts. Three, George Hennessey mused as he took a pleasant walk on a pleasant summer’s evening, late, from his house to the pub in Easingwold for a pint of stout, just one before “last orders” were called. Yes, he thought, the story had three distinct parts. There was, he remembered as his eye was caught by a rapidly darting bat, the incident itself and the story therein, then there was the story as he had told it to Charles, then, finally, there was seeing the woman again.

She had not grown old gracefully: She had refused to surrender to the years, and like so many women who pursue that policy she had, in the opinion of George Hennessey, quite simply made things worse for herself. Even if her figure had remained slender she could not at the age of fifty-plus wear T-shirts and jeans and trainers and drink among the university students and hope to blend in.

Hennessey was walking the walls from the police station at Micklegate Bar to the fish restaurant on Lendal intending to take lunch “out,” as was his custom, when he saw her approaching him. She didn’t recognise him and walked quickly, urgently, in a manner that a casual observer would see as a woman about a pressing errand, a woman going somewhere. But Hennessey, a police officer for the greater part of his working life, and now nearing retirement, was a keen student of human behaviour and he saw instead a frightened woman, speeding away from something, something within her, something in her past from which there is no escape, no matter how breathlessly fast you walk. He recognised her as she wove in and out of the tourists who strolled the walls, but he could not immediately place her, except that he knew she belonged to his professional rather than private life. She approached him and swept past him, the sagging cheeks, the heavy makeup, glistening red lips and scraggy hair, and the quick, quick, quick, short, short, short steps along the ancient battlements, beneath a vast blue, cloudless July sky. On impulse, George Hennessey turned and followed her, quickening his pace to keep up with her.

She passed Micklegate Bar and left the walls at Baile Hill, turned sharp left into Cromwell Road, and entered the Waggoners’ Rest. Hennessey followed her into the pub. He was familiar with the pub, though didn’t often frequent it, knowing it to be a “locals” pub. Few tourists to the Faire and Famouse Citie of York find it, and further, it is the haunt of the youthful set of locals, to which the woman clearly felt she belonged, though it didn’t surprise Hennessey that by the time he entered the pub, the woman had purchased a large port and was sitting alone in the corner of the room. Hennessey purchased a non-alcoholic drink and sat in the far corner, observing her out of the corner of his eye.

Olivia Stringer.

Of course, Olivia Stringer. Her name came to him suddenly. So this is how she has ended up, alone, wasted, probably a drunkard if not an out-and-out alcoholic, judging by her emaciated appearance. A massive glass of port wine and no food to be seen, and that in the middle of the day. And a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth existence too, judging by the threadbare denims and the shapeless green T-shirt. But he felt no pity for her, no compassion, not after what she had done twenty years earlier.

The case, as Hennessey recalled, had unfolded when the driver of a London express train had brought his train to a rapid but controlled stop and had reported to York control that he had “one under” and gave the approximate location. All railway traffic on the down line was halted, and the emergency services had sped to the scene.

George Hennessey, then a detective sergeant with the North Yorkshire Police, was asked to represent the CID. A suicide has to be considered suspicious until foul play can safely be ruled out. By the time Hennessey had arrived at the scene, the body had been lifted from the track, a relief driver had taken the train on, and rail traffic was flowing normally.

“I always said if I had one under, that I’d look away.” The train driver, still clearly shaken, leant against the police vehicle and pulled heavily on a cigarette, and judging by the number of butts screwed into the dry ground at his feet, it was one in a long line of cigarettes he had smoked between the time of the accident and Sergeant Hennessey’s arrival. “But you can’t, you see,” he appealed to Hennessey. “You can’t look away.” He was a small man, Hennessey recalled, and he recalled being amused to note that driving a locomotive capable of 125 miles per hour clearly didn’t involve the use of great physical strength. Up to that point, he had always thought of train drivers as being large, brawny types. Clearly, he found, that was not the case. “I rounded the bend, sixty miles an hour at this point, not fast as fast trains go, but no time to stop before impact. I brought the speed down as fast as I safely could, but there wasn’t enough track to stop. Reckon I hit him doing about forty miles per hour.”

“Fast enough.”

“Oh, aye, fast enough all right, but we had eye contact, right till the end. I mean, he was looking right into my eyes and I was looking right into his. He just stood there. Other drivers say their ‘one unders’ turn away before impact, or stand facing away from the train altogether, or attempt to jump to safety at the last minute.”

“But not this man?”

The driver took one last desperate drag of the cigarette and tossed it to the ground, whereupon he stamped it into the soil with the others. “Not this man, oh no, not this man. Not a bit of it. Have you seen him?”

“Haven’t. Why, should I?”

“Only his appearance, not the normal ‘one under,’ not shabbily dressed, if dressed at all. One of my mates had a ‘one under’ who was totally naked, escaped from a psychiatric hospital, but this guy, well dressed, pinstripe suit, bowler hat, he looked like a bank manager or an accountant, and do you know what he did?”

“Tell me.”

“Just before impact, he raised his hat to me and mouthed, ‘Thank you.’”

Hennessey sipped his tonic water and glanced across at Olivia Stringer, who sat staring into space and was now, courtesy of the planet Earth’s revolutions, bathed in a shaft of sunlight which streamed through the stained-glass window.

The “one under,” that particular “one under,” Hennessey had recalled as being very rapidly identified. What was his name? What was his name? It had an unusual ring to it, something . . . ordinary surname, but very unusual Christian name. Webster. That was it it. . . . Webster. What was his Christian name? Something . . . Webster?

Thomson. That was it. Thomson Webster. A bank manager of the Gilleygate branch of Yorkshire and Lancashire Bank, one of the last of the family-owned banks, as it is still fond of announcing. At first Hennessey had assumed that it was a hyphenated surname.

“No,” Mrs. Webster, sitting in her very “just so” house, had said. “No, it’s a real Christian name, north of England and unusual, but it’s a real Christian name. Thomson. His grandfather was called by that name and he was christened with that name. He wanted our son to bear that name but I refused, of course.”

Hennessey sat ill at ease in the drawing room of the house, which had a superficial appearance-is-everything feel about it. Even Mrs. Webster’s distress had not seemed genuine, and with the passage of time, still didn’t seem so. The French windows opened onto a manicured lawn on which two miniature poodles played and yapped at each other, so Hennessey had further recalled.

“I’m so pleased that Cyril was able to identify poor Thomson, I’m sure I couldn’t.” Mrs. Webster had sniffed and Hennessey couldn’t help thinking that “Cyril” had been short-changed in respect of his name. Given the choice, Hennessey would have preferred to be a “Thomson” rather than a “Cyril,” especially if he had to grow up in the gritty north of England where Cyrils can have an uncomfortable time.

“Can you think of any reason why your husband should have committed suicide, Mrs. Webster?”

“None. No reason.” She had sniffed into a delicately embroidered handkerchief. “He had everything. Me, two children, this house. What more could any man want?”

By this point in his recollection,George Hennessey watched as Olivia Stringer drained the glass of port and staggered with the empty glass to the bar. She fished out a plastic bag from the pocket of her jeans and from it tipped coins onto the bar top. She counted out, in silver and bronze, enough for another large port. She carried the drink unsteadily back to the seat in the corner and began to sip it. She also began talking to herself, as Hennessy’s mind went back to the next stage in that inquiry.

The next stage had been a visit to Mr. Webster’s place of work. He had found the mood among the staff sombre and subdued.

Mr. Penge received the then Sergeant Hennessey in Thomson Webster’s paneled office. “I’m a caretaker manager,” he explained, “here to look after the shop until things get sorted out.”

“Things?” Hennessey had asked. “Many things?”

“About half a million things. We would have been calling the police in now anyway,” Penge, a tall man with a serious attitude, sighed. “I confess, I never thought . . . a smallish family-owned bank . . . we enjoy a lot of staff loyalty . . .”

“A half-million things?” Hennessey had pressed.

“A half-million pounds.”

“Missing?”

“Well, yes, but not in the sense that we don’t know where it’s gone, but missing in the sense that it’s not where it should be. We don’t keep money like that in the vaults; it’s been drained out of a number of dormant accounts. Only found out when one account was activated and we traced the money to Thomson Webster’s personal account, from where it has been taken out in the form of cash. Confess, for a banker he left a trail any idiot could follow.”

“When did you first notice something amiss?”

“About a week ago, which was when Mr. Webster phoned to say he had flu and wouldn’t be coming in to work. We did our investigation and have concluded what we have concluded, that Thomson Webster, loyal employee of the bank, not long to go before retiring, has ruined his life by embezzling half a million pounds of customers’ money. We were about to call the police, but your timely arrival has saved a phone call. Suicide, you say?”

“Appears to be so. This morning on the railway line just south of York.”

“Poor Thomson. I knew him, knew him well. I always found him to be a man of integrity. I can’t imagine what brainstorm he must have had to make him do that . . . then to kill himself. . . . Now that is the Thomson Webster I knew, a man who’d rather take his life than live with a compromised integrity, but Thomson Webster a thief . . . no . . . no way. He was a practising Christian. It must have been a period of insanity. If he had returned the money, it was something the bank would have managed. . . . Early retirement, I would have thought, something of that sort.” Penge leaned forward and rested his forehead in the palm of his left hand. “Oh dear . . . then this morning we received this in the post.” He handed Hennessey a receipt. “It’s a left-luggage receipt from York station. It came with this.” He then handed Hennessey a second piece of paper which revealed itself to be a handwritten note.
“It’s all there . . . so sorry. T. Webster.”
“It’s Thomson Webster’s handwriting.”

“You haven’t collected it?”

“Well, we’d want the police with us anyway if he has put the half-million pounds in the left luggage at York station. We wouldn’t be happy walking through York with a bundle like that.”

“I can imagine. So, shall we go and see what he has left us? I can arrange for a number of constables to bolster our numbers.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

Hennessey and Penge rendezvoused with three constables at York Railway Station’s left-luggage office and presented the receipt. In return, they were handed two large suitcases. Neither was locked and when opened, both were observed to contain large quantities of bank notes.

“We’ll escort you back to the bank with this,” Hennessey said. “A police vehicle and a couple of constables.”

“Appreciate it,” Penge had said. “It’s all going to be there. All half a million. Poor Tom. . . . I know why he killed himself. . . . He couldn’t live with himself after doing this. But why, why did he do it in the first place?”

“I’d like to know that too,” Hennessey had said.

By this point in his recollection, Olivia Stringer was about halfway through the glass of port and was staring into space, chatting quite amicably with herself. Hennessey couldn’t remember who supplied the name, Mr. Penge, or Mrs. Webster, or one of the bank staff. Hennessey couldn’t even remember the name, but it was the name of a man who was of Webster’s age and he and Webster were described as being “like brothers.” Hennessey met him the day after Webster’s suicide, by which time the man had heard the news and was in a state of shock. They sat together on solid wooden garden furniture in the pleasingly mature garden at the rear of the man’s house in Nether Poppleton, where, beyond the garden, was a pleasant view across the meadows to the River Ouse.

“I should have seen it coming,” the man said. “All those signals, clear as daylight in hindsight.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, it started, or stopped, whichever way you look at it, after the birth of their second child. After that, Mrs. Webster moved into the spare room. ‘He’s got two children, no further point in sleeping together.’”