A Shadowed Livery

by Charlie Garratt

  It’s the hardest thing imaginable to have to tell a mother her son has died. I’ve done it several times but the person has never been a child, always a grown man or woman who’s had an accident or been killed in a pub brawl. Sometimes you can sense it’s expected, as if the parent has known the lifestyle of their offspring was going to lead unerringly to an early grave. Usually, though, there’s a profound expression of shock. Each time I’ve had to do it I’ve been overwhelmed by being unable to reach out to the bereaved to comfort them; to say: ‘don’t worry, everything will be fine’. Because it won’t.

  Polly Sharp reacted in a way I least expected. The second the words: ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Sharp, but I have some bad news,’ had left my lips, she stepped forward and slapped me hard across the face.

  ‘Sorry? I told you something was wrong. This is your fault!’ With that she collapsed onto a chair.

  My surprise at her attack quickly gave way to concern. I took a seat until her grief ebbed. The kitchen displayed all the hallmarks of country poverty. A well-worn wooden table, six chairs of mixed parentage, a home-made dresser displaying a range of pots and pans, and a stew bubbling and steaming on a black stove. The air reeked of long-boiled cabbage and damp washing. In another room lay a baby gently gurgling. Billy’s mother eventually spoke, her voice still shaking with emotion.

  ‘I’m sorry, Inspector, I shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Sharp, you’ve had a terrible shock. What did you mean when you said you’d told me something was wrong? We’ve not met before, have we?’

  ‘Not you yourself, Inspector, but your constable, that John Sawyer. I told him. When he came round looking for my Billy. I said to him Billy is a good boy and something must have scared him to make him run away like that. And now you’re going to tell me he’s dead.’

  I could see hope in her eyes for me to tell her she was mistaken, he’d only been hurt in an accident, or we’d arrested him. I could do no more than nod an affirmation and she broke down again.

  Seventeen

  I was up early, largely because the events of the previous evening had left me troubled and sleepless. Also, taking Polly Sharp to identify her son might prove even more stressful than having to inform her he’d died.

  I’d sent a police car to collect her and meet me at the mortuary. She looked like she hadn’t slept much, though she was calm and dignified. The only display of emotion was her briefest of gasps when the shroud was drawn back from Billy’s young face. She nodded when I asked her to confirm it was her son then went back into the police car without a single word.

  ‘I think we need to pull Bamford in again, sir.’

  Sawyer had collared me as soon as I got back from the business with Billy Sharp’s mother.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Leeds rang back while you were out. It seems his story is confirmed by the landlady, except for the night before the murders.’

  ‘If it’s the night before, how does that help us?’

  Bamford reportedly always left his digs straight after breakfast and returned in the evening around seven o’clock, knocking on doors until the light gave out. His landlady was happy to be flexible with his meal-times because he was a good and regular customer. On the day of the murders he’d left in the morning as normal but said he’d be eating out that night and not to wait up for him. She said she hadn’t seen him again until seven the next night. Bamford told her he’d left early in the morning because he had a couple of good prospects lined up a few miles away in Bradford. He apologised for not leaving her a note.

  When Sawyer had heard this from the Leeds police he’d made several quick calculations. He figured out Bamford could have driven down from Leeds anytime on the Thursday, slept in his car, carried out the murders and easily been back by early evening. He’d probably even have had time to knock a few doors on both days so he’d have an alibi if he needed one.

  It seemed plausible enough. I asked Sawyer to arrange a car for us to go to see Bamford, hoping he hadn’t left the area again.

  ‘Before we go, sir, I had another couple of calls this morning. One was from the doctor, confirming Billy’s cause of death. He says the young feller died from a blow to the side of the head, probably caused by a kick from a horse as far as he can tell. He thinks that’s how the fingers were lost as well. He’s suggesting it was a front hoof, rather than a back, because of the shape of the wound.’

  ‘What was the other call?’

  ‘It was from the fingerprint boys. Disappointing, but they said they’ve got quite a bit on at present and it might be two or three weeks before they can get any tests done on our stuff. I pressed them but they weren’t budging.’

  Gerald Bamford’s small, run-down home couldn’t have been more different to Grovestock House. It was easy to see how his daughter would have grabbed Tom Barleigh as a catch. The front garden was overgrown, the gate hanging off its hinges, and the paint was peeling off the front door. A dilapidated Austin Seven sat outside. Sawyer rattled the knocker and we waited. He tried again, this time banging with his fist and shouting Bamford’s name through the letterbox.

  Gerald Bamford opened the door, looking like a mole burst unexpectedly into the outside world, his eyes screwed up against the light. He was as dishevelled as his house, unshaven, without a jacket or tie, and I caught the distinct smell of alcohol on his breath.

  ‘Hello again, Gerald, mind if we come in?’

  I pushed him gently in the chest to move him into the hallway and at once regretted leaving the fresh air. The place stank of unwashed dishes and cigarette smoke.

  ‘Cleaner’s day off, is it, Gerald?’

  We appeared to have woken Bamford and his embarrassment became obvious as he revived. He buttoned his collar and ran a hand through his hair to tidy it.

  ‘What do you want now, Inspector? I don’t have anything else I can tell you.’

  ‘I’m afraid you do, Gerald. You didn’t exactly give us the truth last time about where you were, now, did you?’

  He looked sheepish but tried to bluff his way out of trouble.

  ‘I told you I was in Leeds and that’s where I was. You should ask my landlady.’

  ‘Oh, we have, Gerald, we have. And she tells us you disappeared the night before the murders and didn’t arrive back until late the next day. Plenty of time to get to Grovestock House and back.’

  ‘I was in Leeds. I was. I never drove all the way down here then back again.’

  Sawyer stepped forward and pushed Bamford so hard against the wall I heard the salesman’s teeth rattle.

  ‘If you were in Leeds you weren’t at your digs. So where were you?’

  Bamford considered his options for about fifteen seconds and sensibly decided Sawyer was too big, too young and too fit to have a realistic chance of any resistance. He dropped his shoulders and exhaled long and hard.

  ‘If I tell you, it’s to go no further. Understand?’

  Sawyer looked round at me and I nodded to let Bamford loose.

  ‘Go on, Gerald, spit it out.’

  For the first time since we arrived a brief smile flittered across Bamford’s face.

  ‘Actually I was with a lady friend. But she’s married and her husband mustn’t find out or he’ll knock her about and probably come after me as well. We nipped over to Harrogate for the night while he was away.’

  He gave us her name, and the address of the bed and breakfast where they’d stayed, repeating his request for us to be discrete when checking his story.

  ‘That’s one question out of the way, Gerald — now, what about yesterday? Where were you?’

  ‘Yesterday? I was here at home after you let me go, apart from an hour in the evening.’

  ‘Anyone see you?’

  ‘Not after about eight o’clock. I called round to the Cock and Bear for a few jars then came home and polished off half a bottle of Scotch. Fell asleep in the chair and only woke up when you two started banging on my door.’

&nbs
p; From the smell and look of him it was a plausible enough story.

  ‘What about the afternoon?’

  ‘I’ve told you. I was here. Look, what is this? What am I supposed to have done now?’

  I told him about Billy. Bamford kept on denying he had anything to do with it.

  ‘That’s all well and good, Gerald, but we have four murders on our hands now and you without an alibi for when any of them happened. I’m afraid I’m going to have to take you in until we get your story cleared up.’

  The clothes iron thudded as I dropped it on the table.

  ‘Any reason you had this in your car boot, Gerald?’

  Bamford shook his head without speaking.

  ‘Strange place to keep it, don’t you think? Sort of thing you might keep handy if you wanted to clout someone round the head. Is that what you did, Gerald, drive up to Pardow’s farm, pull Billy Sharp out of the loft then beat his brains in with this?’

  Another shake of the head.

  ‘We’ll easily find out, you know. It already looks to me like this is the weapon that could have killed him. The pathologist will look in more detail and if the shape fits the wounds that will be it, we’ll have you. Now, do you want to tell me the truth? You’ll feel better for it.’

  He slumped forward in his chair with a look of resignation and I thought I’d got him.

  ‘Believe what you want to believe, Inspector, but I didn’t do it. Why would I kill a young lad I’d never met? Ask yourself why I’d kill my lovely Jenny? I can’t remember why I had the iron in my car but it wasn’t there to murder anyone. If you can’t accept that I’m innocent then I suppose there’s not much I can do about it.’

  A couple of hour’s further questioning of Bamford in the cells produced no more results so I left him there to stew and just hoped the experts could match it to how Billy Sharp was killed. Then we’d have to go through his story again and find the links to the other murders.

  I went over to Grovestock House to re-interview everyone about their whereabouts the previous day, sending a message to Sawyer to meet me there. He was waiting in the morning room when I arrived.

  ‘Afternoon, John, what have you got for me?’

  ‘I’ve been busy since I left you, sir, but not great news, I’m afraid. First off, I went into the village and asked a few more questions about Michael Parry. Apparently he was seen in a couple of places at the time Jenny Bamford was shot.’

  ‘So we think he’s probably out of it now?’

  ‘Well, sir, only if we’re sticking with the theory that all three were killed by the same person. Personally, I think it must have been him in the woods earlier so he might just have had time to kill both the Barleighs but not Jenny. If Jenny Bamford did commit suicide, Parry’s still a possibility.’ He paused as if concerned about what he was going to say next. ‘And we only have his sister’s word he’s now out of the country.’

  I bit my tongue, and asked him to carry on with his report.

  ‘Next, I called round to see young Alf Nash again. I thought he hadn’t entirely come clean last time I spoke to him. He’d already been told about Billy and was petrified so it wasn’t too difficult to get him to open up. Billy had slipped back home to leave a note for his mother and met Alf when he was coming away. He told Alf he’d seen someone with the shotgun leaving through the kitchen door. Thinking they might have seen him, he legged it over the wall and ran for his life.’

  ‘And he didn’t tell Alf who he thought it was?’

  ‘No, only that he thought it was a man. Alf also said he’d told Billy I’d been looking for him and he’d been frightened out of his wits so Alf told him about the uncle’s barn, where we found him.’

  ‘So it seems like the lad died for nothing if he couldn’t identify who the man with the shotgun was.’

  ‘Sounds like it, sir.’

  ‘Is that it, John? Anything else?’

  ‘Afraid so.’ Could it get any worse? ‘I called into the station earlier and there was a message from Leeds police. It seems Gerald Bamford was in Harrogate like he says.’

  I swore and shook my head. Blind alley after blind alley. I’d felt sure we might be on to something with Bamford. Now I had no alternative but to let him go and to keep digging.

  Mrs Veasey almost dropped the teapot as a crack of thunder echoed round the kitchen and hailstones rattled the window.

  I’d sent Sawyer off for the day to write up his notes and found my way down to scrounge a cup of tea before I began my interviews. The cook was in a terrible flap about Billy’s murder and was convinced everyone in the house would soon be killed off in their beds. It seemed she’d already heard several versions of events as news trickled in from the village, and now she was pumping me for more information but I wasn’t prepared to give anything away. It was safer to stick with the weather.

  ‘Fairly pouring down out there, Mrs Veasey. Do you think it’s ever going to stop?’

  ‘Terrible, isn’t it? Rain, rain, rain for the last three days. Everyone’s coming in soaked and dripping all over the place. Miss Parry’s at her wits end trying to keep the house clean and they tell me the whole countryside is like a swamp.’

  ‘I can vouch for that, Mrs Veasey, the roads are treacherous.’

  ‘Why, even Sir Arthur came off his horse yesterday and he’s a very good rider.’

  ‘Was he hurt?’

  ‘Only his pride, I think, but he’d cut his face and was covered in mud. He took his boots off in the kitchen, naturally, but he dropped dirt all through the house on his way to his room. Staff weren’t at all happy but he pays the wages, so he can do as he pleases, I suppose, and he apologised later in any case. Said he was just angry at himself for ruining his good clothes.’

  We carried on in this vein until I’d almost finished my tea, with the cook repeatedly returning to Billy and his murder.

  ‘We all knew where Billy was hiding, Mr Given. In Alf Nash’s uncle’s barn, wasn’t it?’

  ‘And how, exactly, did you know this, Mrs Veasey?’

  ‘It was all around the village days ago. Someone said Alf was drunk and sharing secrets in the pub. Doesn’t take long for news like that to get round, not here anyways.’

  It didn’t take much intelligence to guess who had helped spread the story.

  ‘Shame you didn’t feel inclined to pass it on to me, then. Perhaps Billy might still have been alive if we’d got to him first.’

  I was annoyed at the cook, but not half as annoyed as I was with Sawyer and myself for not having picked it up ourselves. There’d be no point in quizzing the other staff about where they’d been when the young lad was killed. Mrs Veasey knew enough about his hiding place, death and discovery and would certainly have passed these around freely. Everyone, from the under-gardeners to Sir Arthur himself would know it all and would have had enough time and information to concoct a plausible alibi. The stupid reluctance to tell the police had cost a boy his life.

  With Gerald Bamford and Michael Parry out of the frame, it had to be someone who was in the house at the time. Unless, heaven forbid, it was somebody we hadn’t even looked at yet. Even Alan Haleson had been in custody for the last week so couldn’t have murdered Billy Sharp. Both sets of killings were obviously connected but had the same person carried them out? There was still no guarantee they had, so Haleson was still a remote possibility. Apart from him, we had the missing nurse and not much else.

  I left the cook in the kitchen, mulling over what I had said to her and made my way to the morning room to telephone Sawyer about my lack of progress. Elizabeth was coming through the hall from the other direction and turned on her heels as soon as she saw me. I called after her and asked if we could have a word.

  ‘Why would I wish to speak to you, Inspector?’

  ‘Because I want to apologise, Elizabeth. You must know by now we think Michael probably wasn’t involved.’

  As soon as the words left my lips I knew I could have phrased it better.

  �
��Probably? You only say “probably” and still think your apology is enough? Michael definitely wasn’t involved and I won’t accept any apology from you until you acknowledge that.’

  ‘Elizabeth, you know I can’t rule him out altogether. This whole thing is a mess and we’re not certain about anything. We have four deaths, that’s obvious, but do we have four murders? Three murders and a suicide? One murderer? Two murderers? I wish to God I knew what was going on.’

  ‘That’s no reason for you to doubt my word. Now, perhaps I’ll just get on with my work, and you can get on with yours. Goodbye, James.’

  Eighteen

  There’d been no progress on the Grovestock House case for a few days so I was relieved when Sawyer rang to say Trudi Collinge had been found working in a nursing home in Leamington. He’d put the word out that we were looking for her, and an off-duty copper visiting his mother in the home had recognised the description. He discretely asked the matron a couple of questions before calling us.

  I told Sawyer to arrange for Collinge to be picked up and brought over to Kenilworth, where he should join me after arranging to have her room searched. Mountains of paperwork had been building up in my absence, so I dived into these until the front desk rang to tell me Trudi Collinge had been put in an interview room.

  The woman sitting before us was completely different to how I’d imagined her. The picture in my mind’s eye of the nurse was of a middle-class, dowdy and slightly overweight woman in her early fifties. But here was a striking brunette, at least ten years younger, slim and elegant, dressed in clothes of the latest fashion. I felt a slight tremor in her fingers when she stood and offered her hand and put this down to nervousness. Although she smiled I could see she was putting on a brave face. Whether she’d ever been inside a police station before I didn’t know, but even the most hardened criminals can’t help being anxious when they’re hauled in for interview.