Death Comes to Dartmoor

by Vivian Conroy

  Lamb’s figure appeared, her valise in hand. She was carrying a lantern and taking the path that led from the inn to the village. A stretch of a good mile. Hung with shadows. Where would the killer strike?

  They had studied the land in daylight and determined how they could keep an eye on the path and Lamb while themselves keeping out of sight of the killer, who would surely follow Lamb or wait for her along the path. Following her was more likely, as Raven had conjectured the killer would have to be in the inn to learn of Lamb’s dismissal and the thing she had supposedly found and was carrying off.

  They crouched along the brush, keeping their eyes on the figure.

  “Someone left the inn and follows her,” Bowsprit reported after a while.

  The night was dark and restless around them, strange sounds rustling through the brush. Merula wished she was in her bed, trying to sleep despite the wind rattling the windowpane. But this had to be done. For the sake of Oaks and the murdered Tillie, her distraught father, and an entire community torn apart by the strange events.

  “He’s overtaking her,” Bowsprit said softly.

  They closed in on the two figures. Lamb was walking fast, determined, not stopping to look about her. The figure following her was just as quick and deathly silent. This path was obviously familiar to him, as he didn’t need to watch his step.

  Then Lamb suddenly halted and put the valise down, leaning over as if to fasten her shoe better.

  The figure closed in.

  “Now,” Raven breathed to Bowsprit, and the two of them sprinted to the figure just as he lifted his hands, holding something and swinging it over Lamb’s head as she straightened up. She screamed, but the sound died down at once in a gurgle.

  Merula ran as well, her heart beating fast. How quickly could the killer strangle a victim? What was he using as his weapon? The kraken’s missing arm? Surely it was too soft and pliable? Rope, then? Or cloth? What had left those odd markings?

  Raven grabbed one arm of the attacker, Bowsprit the other. The two of them had to struggle to break the figure’s hold on whatever he had around Lamb’s neck. She made sounds again, spluttering.

  Merula assumed that as long as she was resisting, it meant the attempt on her life had been unsuccessful. She reached her and grabbed her, asking if she was well.

  The figure hissed and cursed. Raven wrenched an item out of his hands, while Bowsprit pushed him to the ground and tried to pull his arms behind his back to tie them together.

  “Look!” Raven held up a leather belt. The studs on it sparked in the lantern light. “A special tool made to kill and make it look like some creature from the deep had done it. Markings as if from tentacles.”

  The figure lay still now, his hands bound at his back. Bowsprit pulled him to his feet.

  And the light fell on his face.

  Merula gasped. The haggard features of the blacksmith stared back at her, his eyes dead and dull.

  “You killed your own daughter,” she whispered. “How could you?”

  “She wasn’t my daughter anymore. She had betrayed me. First she didn’t want to live with me anymore. She moved into this fancy house, telling me time and time again how beautiful it was in there. It had a brass teapot as big as she was, she said. As if such a thing can even exist. As if people like us could ever afford such things. Then she refused to help me with the land. If we had given the land to the city people, they would have rewarded us handsomely. We would have had a decent life for once. I could have bought her a dress if she wanted one. A bracelet even. Not a trinket, but a real piece of jewelry like fine ladies wear. Not this constant scraping by. All she had to do was deliver the deed of the house into my hands. I would have passed it on.”

  “The house wasn’t yours to sell.”

  “But Oaks would leave. That had been told to me.”

  “And you helped it along by committing a murder that was supposedly done by a monster from the sea.”

  The old man glared at her. “It would have succeeded if you hadn’t come. You are too clever for your own good.”

  “We can better deliver this man to the police,” Bowsprit said.

  Merula stood with her arm around Lamb, who was rubbing her throat and coughing.

  The blacksmith said, “It need not be this way. We can all share the money. Give me what is in that suitcase and I will deliver it to the railway men. They will give me money and I will share with you.”

  “We don’t want money,” Raven said.

  “No, you don’t need money,” the man retorted. “That makes all the difference. For all of my life I have wanted to have something, be something. But I never had a son and then my wife had to die, leaving me with nothing but this little slip of a girl. She wasn’t winsome either, like Fern was, who could attract good men. Fern might have done well for herself, married above her station, if she had used her assets right, but not my girl. She just got herself into trouble. She never could believe Webber was a bag of wind. She honestly believed he loved her and would make her life better. Ha! All it would have done is make the entire village laugh at me. The men smirked at her already that night. I couldn’t believe what they were saying. That she could really be with child. I had warned her often. But she had to be stupid.”

  Merula glanced at Lamb, who stood motionless, her eyes wide with shock now that the name of her beloved had been mentioned quite so casually. Her hero, her future, wiped away with one brush of the hand.

  “Even if she did a stupid thing, that didn’t mean she had to die,” Raven said, and nodded at Bowsprit. “Let us bring him in to the police. We can show them his belt. Homemade especially for the purpose. I don’t think that even our experienced Scotland Yard inspector has ever seen quite such a thing.”

  Merula held the blacksmith’s gaze, desperate to understand what had driven him to his crime. How he could stand here, facing them, and talk about it as if it had been logical, necessary even.

  “Parents do abandon their children …” Her voice shivered on the words, the wounds inflicted by what she had discovered still raw. “But to kill them … How could you? She trusted you. She came to you by the river that night believing …”

  “She didn’t go to the river.” The man’s voice was flat and dead. “She went to our house. She had heard the men’s remarks at the inn. She knew what it meant. Soon everyone would know it, laugh at her, at me.”

  His expression tightened even more. “I came in. She hadn’t expected me back yet. Usually I stayed out late. But I had followed her home. To see what she was up to, if she was going to meet Webber. I could have killed them both, just …”

  He gasped for breath. “She was going through her mother’s things. I saw her and asked what she was doing. Going away, she said. She couldn’t stay, she said. She would not deceive Oaks any longer. She felt sorry for the drops I had asked her to put in the bottle beside the bed. She said she would pour them away so he couldn’t take them anymore. She wanted to help him, even after he had rejected her. She had tried to throw herself at him, the foolish girl, believing he might wed her and cover up her shame. I told her he would never. Such a fine gentleman, court a girl like her? Then she started screaming at me that anything was better than staying with me. She had the music box in her hand. Her mother’s music box. She used to play it at night. It played such a pretty tune. I would never have parted with it. Never. Not to pay whatever debt …” His voice faltered.

  The lantern light played across his tense features, hovering between the five of them as they formed a small circle in the expanse of the lonely moors.

  “She dropped it,” he croaked. “It fell to the boards and it burst apart. It made this last sound as if … it was dying. Then she had to die as well.”

  “You strangled her in your home and then you took her out to the river?”

  “On the pony. I left it away from the soft bank so it wouldn’t leave any tracks. But there were plenty there. Travelers water their horses there. I simply had to point some out
and say I recognized them as belonging to Oaks’s horse. I knew the police would never go compare the actual horse’s shoes to the prints. Why would they? They are of us, and Oaks never was.”

  “But an inspector came from the city.”

  “He locked up Oaks, didn’t he?” The blacksmith’s eyes flashed. “It would have worked if you hadn’t interfered.”

  “If we hadn’t interfered,” Raven said cynically, “you would have made another victim tonight. You didn’t stop. Even after the death of your own daughter, you didn’t stop.”

  “The money was mine,” the man growled, his mouth twisted into a sneer. “I gave everything for it. I deserved to have it. If this girl”—he nodded at Lamb—“had a clue from the house, I needed to have it.”

  “The scheme has fallen through,” Merula said. “Bixby became afraid of the police and confessed it all to us.”

  The blacksmith stared at her in disbelief. “Some men have no guts,” he rasped.

  “For some, there is a limit to what they are willing to do,” Raven countered. “Bixby shied away from having anything to do with murder.”

  “But you didn’t,” Bowsprit said. “You had already created this.” He held out the specially prepared belt. The studs gleamed in the lantern light.

  For a moment, Merula didn’t understand what he was saying. Then with a shock, she realized. If the special belt to use in the strangulation had been prepared in advance, the blacksmith hadn’t strangled his daughter in a fit of emotion over the discovery of her condition, the fear of humiliation, or over the broken keepsake, a memento of his beloved wife.

  Uncertain what to believe now, she studied the man’s weathered face.

  His dull eyes flickered a moment. “There had to be victims at some point. Oaks wasn’t leaving. Only deaths could convince the people that his creatures were dangerous and he had to be driven away. The drops would make him act like a lunatic. People would readily believe that victims found in the woods had been slaughtered by his sea creature. I never meant for Tillie to … But she wanted to leave me. After all we had been through. She couldn’t just leave!”

  Merula remembered how earlier when she had spoken with him, she had said that his wife hadn’t wanted to leave him and he had seemed to whisper in response, “Yes, she did.” Had he been thinking of his dead daughter? The unintended first victim of his plan to create deaths and drive Oaks away, complete what Bixby hadn’t been able to achieve? All for money, a way out of the debt he had drunk and gambled himself into?

  “Perhaps killing was easier as you had already done it before,” Raven said softly. “The old village doctor died when his horse’s harness broke and he was dragged off the box. Did the harness break by accident? Or had you tampered with it? Because you hated him for being unable to cure your wife?”

  “For giving me false hope, making me pay for all his worthless cures which only made her worse. He knew she was beyond saving, and still he kept prescribing new drops. Merely for money. He was a predator and he deserved to die.” The old man stared at him with flashing eyes. “No one questioned that it was an accident. And no one questioned that the sea monster had killed my Tillie and Oaks was to blame. Why did you have to come and ruin it all? You’re not one of us. You haven’t lived our life. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  Raven sighed. “What you intended when you made this belt, and whether you planned to kill your daughter beforehand or acted on impulse that night when you found her in your house, is for the jury to decide. I wouldn’t like to be in their shoes.”

  The old man stared at him, as if the mention of a jury made him realize that he would stand trial and would have to depend on the verdict of people to whom his motives would mean but little weighed against the magnitude of his crime.

  He lowered his head, and tears glistened in his eyes. They slipped down his cheeks, as his tied hands were unable to wipe them away.

  “Stupid girl,” he whispered. “Stupid little girl.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Oaks sat at the breakfast table with them, blinking as if he had woken up from some strange dream. He absentmindedly plunged his bread in his coffee and, when he noticed, dropped it on his plate. He stared around the room as if he was seeing it for the very first time.

  “I don’t know how you managed it,” he said at last. “I saw no way out of it. I didn’t know what to do. Perhaps I was mad? Everyone seemed to think so.”

  “That specialist Bixby engaged wasn’t even a doctor, so you need not worry about his dire prognosis for your health. The drops you took had been tampered with without your knowledge, and they made you restless and caused you to lose consciousness.”

  Oaks rubbed his face. “I still can’t believe Tillie added something to my drops. I would never have believed she could do anything to harm me.”

  Merula said softly, “She didn’t want to harm you. She only worked with her father because she believed that the money involved would solve his debt and change him for the better. When she realized what she had become, she wanted to get away, also for the sake of her baby. But her father wasn’t about to let her.”

  Oaks crumbled another piece of bread, bits raining around his plate and into his lap. “It’s terrible. Who can you trust these days?”

  Raven said, “You’ll have to guard your collection better so characters like Ben Webber don’t have access to it anymore. He took the Tasmanian devil but denied having taken the kraken’s arm. I’m still not sure who did that or why. The blacksmith had his own killing tool. He didn’t need the arm, unless he removed it to make the illusion of a murderous creature even more real. But he was never inside the house, and I can’t see a girl like Tillie cutting off a kraken’s arm with such skill. It’s such a clean cut, one would think it was done in a single movement.”

  Oaks nodded. “Very astute, Raven. The cut was made by an ax.”

  Raven tilted his head. “You did it? To study the suckers more closely, perhaps determine if they were poisonous?”

  Oaks looked horrified. “I’d never violate one of my own specimens in such a brutal way. The kraken came to me exactly as you can see it hanging on the stand. The tales I heard from native fishermen and resident natural historians led me to deduce that the lost arm must have been cut off by an ax in a direct confrontation between fishermen and the kraken.”

  “So they do attack boats?” Merula asked.

  “Apparently.” Oaks looked at Raven again. “I could have told you so if I hadn’t been locked up and treated like a madman. And when you came to my cell door, I didn’t get half a chance to tell you anything.” The indignation about that was still thick in his voice.

  Raven made an apologetic gesture. “There was hardly time to discuss things at leisure. I only wanted to unmask that Dr. Twicklestone as an impostor. Not just to prove to the inspector that he was building a faulty case, but also to show you that you were never either ill or unbalanced. You just need some rest and then all will be well. Oh, now I remember.”

  Raven reached into his pocket and produced the notebook Merula had found in Oaks’s bed. “This belongs to you. It turned up after the police took you away that night. I have to confess we looked inside it, believing it might help us clear your name.”

  Merula added, “The calculations had us puzzled.”

  Oaks accepted the notebook from him with a wry expression. “I was trying to work out how to maintain this house on my income. On my travels, I often joined other people’s expeditions and they paid most expenses. Some even paid me, for my expertise. Now that I have a household to run, everything became more complicated.”

  He smiled ruefully. “I was worried that the railroad people might force me to sell, so I wanted to be financially secure. I even read up on graves on the moors where riches were supposed to be hidden. But what I discovered about grave robbers throughout history didn’t entice me to try to make my fortune that way.”

  Merula said, “When we arrived, Raven asked you if you might write about your
travels. That could provide some money, especially if you include sketches of the rare animals you’ve collected on the way.”

  “Merula can draw well,” Raven said. “She might assist you in making those sketches.”

  Merula was surprised that he had so much faith in her talent even though he had never seen any of her actual work.

  “You don’t have to expect, though,” Bowsprit said gravely, “that people will believe the animals actually exist. Mrs. Merian drew what she herself had seen in Suriname, and still many doubted whether her drawings were accurate. A spider that can grab a bird; how could something like that possibly exist?”

  Oaks didn’t seem to have listened well to their discussion. He shook his head, the worried look deepening. “Those railway people will want their line to come. They’ll keep pestering me about selling the house. They’re persistent. You caught the little fish, Raven, but the big ones are still free. The men behind it who caused all of this misery. They only used people like that poor blacksmith and that arrogant snob Bixby to get their hands on my land. They will try again.”

  Raven glanced at Merula. He could not, of course, deny that or reassure Oaks that it wouldn’t be so bad.

  “I think,” Bowsprit said, “that you must look into the value of the land from a conservational point of view. I read a most interesting little pamphlet about national parks in America. There they protect nature and preserve it, making it impossible to build there or exploit the land in other ways. If you could make this a national park, there would never be a railway through it.”

  Oaks sat up. “Could I really?”

  “You would be the best person to do it. You’ve traveled, you value wildlife, you have specimens here that museums would love to have. Get into touch with the right people in London and you will be protected by friends as powerful as these railroad people are.”

  “Excellent thinking, Bowsprit,” Raven enthused. “Let me know if you need introductions of any kind. I happen to know some people inside the Royal Zoological Society.”