Dead on Dartmoor

by Stephanie Austin

  I love that man. ‘So, what’s in all these bags, then?’

  ‘More stuff for sale.’ Ricky pulled out a black dress, its layers heavily beaded.

  ‘This isn’t from the sixties.’ I took it from him and held it up. ‘This is earlier – forties, I would think − and it’s an original.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ he said. ‘It is an antique. We can’t send it out on hire, the fabric is too fragile – rips if you so much as look at it. And everyone was smaller back then,’ he added. ‘This won’t fit anyone now − well, not the strapping great tarts you see these days – might just as well sell it.’

  ‘If you’re sure …’ I said, doubtfully, holding it up for a closer look.

  ‘Same with those white boots,’ Ricky went on. ‘No one can fit into them these days.’

  ‘What size are they?’

  ‘It’s not the shoe size, it’s the calves. Skinny legs those dolly birds had … Oh, hello! I stand corrected,’ he said as Sophie stood triumphantly in the boots and began parading about in them. ‘Sparrow’s Ankles has got ’em zipped up. Mind you, look at them calves,’ he went on, nodding at her legs, ‘no fatter than a pair of sauce bottles …’

  We were all laughing as Morris appeared with a loaded tray of tea and buttered banana bread. And it was in that moment that a voice cut through our merriment like an arctic wind and froze it on our lips.

  ‘Enjoying ourselves, are we?’

  Detective Constable DeVille, Inspector Ford’s sidekick, known to all who loathe her as Cruella, had come in through the shop and was standing in the storeroom doorway. She’s a striking-looking young woman with ebony hair in a sleek bob, an almost unnaturally pale face, and huge, violet-blue eyes. But her bid for beauty is ruined by a small, downturned mouth that gives her a permanent look of disapproval. Today, it seemed, she had a sidekick of her own. He was a broad-shouldered individual with brown hair shaved to stubble and the solid, stocky build that should make criminals think twice about grappling with him; he looked like a rugby player. She introduced him as Detective Constable Dean Collins. He gave a silent nod of greeting.

  ‘You’ve left the door of your shop unlocked,’ Constable DeVille went on, in the voice of a headmistress addressing naughty schoolchildren, ‘and there are three handbags in plain sight.’ She might as well have added it would serve us right if they got nicked.

  No one said anything. We all felt chastened, not by leaving our bags unguarded but by our laughter, by being caught out in behaviour that seemed inappropriate in the tragic circumstances. She should have arrived half an hour before when we were weeping like drains.

  ‘We’ve come for Gavin Hall’s phone.’

  ‘It’s in the shop, I’ll get it.’

  The two detectives trailed after me, and as I took the phone from Gavin’s jacket pocket, DeVille was ready with a plastic evidence bag open in her hand and I dropped it in. Collins had picked up one of Gavin’s magazines and was leafing through it. Cruella scowled over his shoulder. ‘Is this the sort of stuff he sold?’ she asked, picking up another.

  ‘Is there any more news,’ I asked, ‘about what happened to Gavin?’

  ‘We’re keeping an open mind at present.’ Her voice told me to mind my own business.

  I persevered. ‘Have you found his spectacles yet?’

  DC Collins glanced up from his comic. ‘Forensics found them this morning, on the path. He must have dropped them.’

  Ricky appeared from the storeroom at that moment carrying a short, white fake-fur jacket freckled with black spots. ‘You know, Constable DeVille, you’d look sensational in this!’

  Cruella’s black brows arched upward and her little mouth quivered. For a moment she struggled, not sure if she was being mocked. I caught a twinkle in her colleague’s eye. He folded his lips to hide a smile. If only she had laughed, treated the whole thing as a joke; instead she flung the comic back on the table and glared. ‘Come on, Collins. We’ve got what we came for,’ and she marched out. Collins, who looked as if he would have liked to peruse his comic for a bit longer, put it back and followed her. He nodded a goodbye to me and, as he passed the shop window, I could see he was grinning.

  I turned the key in the lock after him so that we could enjoy our tea in peace.

  ‘You’re evil,’ I told Ricky as we trooped back into the storeroom.

  ‘S’not my fault she can’t take a joke.’ He looked at the fur jacket and sighed. ‘The sad thing is, she would look sensational in this.’

  ‘Can I try it?’ Sophie mumbled through a mouthful of banana bread. She was still wearing the cap and boots.

  ‘Too big for you,’ he told her frankly. ‘You stick with the cap and boots.’

  ‘I can’t afford them,’ she sighed soulfully, turning tragic dark eyes upon him. She caught a warning frown from me. ‘I’ll have to save up,’ she added quickly, unzipping the boots and wriggling her feet out.

  ‘Yes, you will,’ Ricky told her flatly. ‘But you can keep the cap,’ he added, winking at her.

  ‘You look fab.’

  ‘Oh, thank you!’ She spun around to take another look at herself in the mirror.

  ‘Did you see we’d sold a painting for you yesterday, Sophie?’ Morris asked coyly.

  ‘No!’ she squeaked. ‘Which one?’

  ‘You’d better go and look in the book,’ Ricky recommended, and she rushed out into the shop. Pat, during all this, had seated herself at the table, and was carefully selecting lengths of ribbon from the trug, laying each strip out methodically.

  ‘Aren’t these trimmings precious?’ I asked Morris, watching her. ‘Don’t you need all these for costumes?’

  ‘I’ve got miles and miles of the stuff,’ he assured me, ‘and these are just odd bits.’

  ‘I want a word with you, anyway, Pat,’ Ricky began ominously, making her stop and look up. ‘Your country panoramas—’

  ‘What’s wrong with ’em?’ she demanded, immediately suspicious.

  ‘You’re not charging enough for them.’

  I cheered. I’d been telling Pat this for ages. Her country panoramas are created from felt and wool, delightful scenes of fields and cottages, with knitted trees and woolly sheep, little dressed figures of shepherds and farmers, each scene contained in a deep box frame behind glass. ‘They must take you hours and hours,’ Morris said.

  ‘If I make ’em too expensive, I won’t sell them,’ Pat told him.

  ‘And you won’t sell ’em if you make them too cheap,’ Ricky argued, mimicking her local accent. ‘People equate cheap with tat. They won’t value your work if you don’t.’

  Pat was shaking her head. ‘Look, I sold one yesterday,’ Ricky went on, ‘and I whacked another fifteen quid on the price. The customer walked off with it, perfectly happy.’

  Pat, who suspected Ricky of winding her up whenever he opened his mouth, scurried off into the shop to check the veracity of this in the ledger.

  ‘Sell anything for me?’ I asked, ever hopeful.

  ‘Nah, sorry!’

  ‘Take no notice of him, Juno.’ Morris bustled up to me. ‘We sold a pair of brass candlesticks and a very pretty ribbon plate.’

  Sophie rushed back in, pink with pleasure: one of her most expensive paintings had been sold, an autumn hedgerow scene. ‘Who bought it?’ she demanded.

  Ricky shrugged. ‘Oh, some pair of old tarts.’

  ‘They said they had the perfect place for it,’ Morris added.

  There was something about Ricky’s shrug, Morris’s coy smile. A little cat’s tail of suspicion twitched in my mind. I leant in close to him and murmured, ‘Would that perfect place be in your breakfast room or over the mantelpiece in your lounge?’

  Morris placed a finger against his lips. ‘Don’t spoil it for her,’ he whispered, as Sophie went rushing back into the shop to choose a replacement to hang on the wall. ‘It’s in the music room,’ he confessed, when she’d gone out.

  ‘I’m not going to find that ribbon plate hanging
in there as well, am I?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he admonished me, patting my hand, ‘that’s in the downstairs loo.’

  Later, much later, when I was back in the flat on my own, feet up on the sofa, radio playing softly, my diary open on my lap, I found myself thinking about spectacles. I was supposed to be going through the diary, reworking the shop rota for next week. With no Gavin, I had spaces to fill. Fortunately, Sophie would be starting work on the bull portrait for Sandy Westershall’s birthday and so would have to be in the shop most of the time. At least, I hoped she’d be starting work on it. She’d announced during the afternoon that she didn’t want to do it any more, after what had happened to Gavin, and it took a stern talking-to from me and Ricky to persuade her that she couldn’t afford to pass up the opportunity. I understood how she felt. I didn’t want to go back to Moorworthy House again either, or even think about the place, but she would have to toughen up, put her feelings to one side. Business was business.

  Pat had already done more than her fair share in Old Nick’s last week and I knew she was needed at Honeysuckle Farm. But I had a full week’s work ahead of me and didn’t know how I was going to manage extra hours in the shop. My attempts to wrestle with the diary weren’t helped by the sudden appearance of Bill, who leapt on the sofa and settled down on top of the pages, obliterating them from view. I gave him a brief summary of how helpful this was, and he responded by purring like a buzz saw, tucking his paws under and closing his one eye.

  I gave up on the diary and lay back, eyes closed, listening to the rasping rhythm of Bill’s purr. My mind kept drifting back to spectacles. Morris wore his all the time, but peered over the top of them mostly, only really using them for sewing or reading. Sophie was supposed to wear hers, but was too vain, so coped without them unless she really needed them. Nick used to wear his, but only when he was working on the fine details of some restoration work. But Gavin wore his all the time. When he was in the shop, when he was cycling, I had never seen his face without them, never seen him put them down on a table, or fold them and tuck them away in a pocket. He was very short-sighted. Without them his world must have been a blur. So if they had fallen off when he was larking around in the woods, waving that silly sword about, and his whole world turned fuzzy, surely he would have stopped to find them, there and then? He depended on them totally. He couldn’t have carried on through the wood for another fifty yards to the place where I had found his body. He would have been forced to stop; unless of course, he was running away from something, or from someone – running for his life.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I didn’t get to Old Nick’s until closing time. Monday was a busy day, with five dogs to walk now that EB had fully recovered, Maisie to clean and shop for, a towering pile of shirts to iron for Simon the accountant, and a full afternoon’s tidy-up of Mrs Berkeley-Smythe’s garden. It was a large garden and she liked it kept tidy even though she was away on the high seas most of the time and rarely home to appreciate it. This meant that I fell in through the shop door just as Sophie was putting on her coat to go home. She’d had a quiet day: no customers, but she’d made a start on preliminary sketches for her portrait of the Old Thunderer. There’d been a phone call from Vicky Smithson, to ask how we all were, but otherwise she’d had no human contact and was looking forward to going to the pub that evening with friends. She invited me to join them, but I declined and offered to lock up the shop. I wanted to do some rearranging of my stock after the hostile takeover of my unit by the vintage clothes mafia.

  I spent an hour in the stockroom, mooching about without achieving much, moving things around and then putting them back again, before I decided I might as well give up, go home and spend another thrilling evening watching auction lots on eBay. I had my eye on some pretty 1920s evening bags; unfortunately, so did a lot of other people. Staying up until the early hours, trying to slip in the final bid before the auction closed, only to be pipped at the post at the very last second, was a frustrating experience. But as well as the bags there was a job lot of hatpins for sale, complete with two pretty porcelain hatpin holders that I was determined to get my hands on, so I reckoned it was worth another night at the screen-face.

  It was only as I went to switch the lights off in the shop that I realised someone was lurking in the lane outside the door. A hunched figure, a hand shading his eyes, was staring in through the glass. For a moment I thought it was Creeping Ted Croaker but realised the figure was too tall. The closed sign was on the door, but as he saw me, whoever it was, he began to rattle the handle.

  ‘I’m sorry, we’re closed,’ I said, loudly enough for him to hear me from the other side of the door, but he started banging on the glass. Surely he realised it was too late for the shop to be open? But there was a grim purposefulness to his banging, and I knew I would have to open the door. Then I recognised him, although he seemed to have aged a hundred years since I last saw him, his features gaunt, his eyes sunken and wretched: the face of a man who had lost his only child.

  ‘Mr Hall,’ I breathed, when I had got the door open. ‘Please, come in.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he began brokenly,’ I didn’t really expect anyone to be here … then I saw the lights … I just wondered if I could talk to you …’

  I stood staring at him, unprepared for this moment.

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it, who found my poor son?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, recovering my wits. ‘I’m so very sorry … Look, please … would you like to come upstairs? We could sit down … I could make some tea …’

  He didn’t answer, just stared around him, his gaze finally resting on Gavin’s jacket hanging on the back of his chair. ‘How is your wife?’ I asked him in the silence.

  He dragged his eyes away from the jacket and stared at me, his gaze almost unfocussed. He spoke slowly, as if his thoughts were happening in slow motion, as if he were sleepwalking. ‘She … her sister has come to stay. She’s with her now.’

  I wasn’t sure what to say next. Mr Hall had picked up one of the comics from Gavin’s table and was staring at it, turning the pages over slowly as he spoke.

  ‘He was supposed to go to university, you know. He got top grades in his A levels. But Gavin didn’t always get on with his peers. His mother and I thought perhaps, it might be wise, give him a little experience of the world before he went … but now, I wonder, if Gavin might not have—’ His voice broke and he stood with the magazine shaking in his hands.

  ‘Please, Mr Hall,’ I begged, touching his arm tentatively, ‘I think it might be best if you sat down. Here,’ I brought a chair up behind him and he sank down into it, the magazine dropping to the floor. I picked it up as Gavin’s father sat with his head in his hands and wept, his shoulders shaking piteously.

  ‘Would you like a drink of water?’ I asked, after I had let him sob a while.

  He looked up, wiping his streaming eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘No, thank you.’ He took a deep breath, steadying himself. ‘I’d just like you to tell me what happened.’

  I told him, as gently as I could, about our day at the fair, about the last time I had seen Gavin, heading, as I thought, for the car, and how Sophie and I had found his body in the woods.

  ‘And the man who sold him this dreadful weapon …’ He leant forward, gripped my wrist with a sudden force that made me wince, and stared intently into my face. ‘… does he know what happened to my son as a consequence?’

  ‘I’m sure he does,’ I answered. Cautiously, I put my hand over his gripping one and he released me, muttering an apology. ‘But I think if you wanted to know more about that,’ I went on, ‘the correct person to speak to would be Inspector Ford.’

  He stood suddenly, as if by some inner prompting, and then looked around him, lost, as if he didn’t know why he’d got up, as if he wasn’t sure where he was.

  ‘Mr Hall, if there is anything I can do …’ I left the rest hanging, as we all do, when we know that there is nothing we can do, nothing that
will make the loved one live again.

  He touched the cover of one of the graphic novels on Gavin’s table. ‘He was so into all this stuff,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’ll come and get rid of it all … sometime.’

  ‘There’s no rush.’ I picked up Gavin’s jacket and held it out to him. ‘You’ll want to take this.’

  For a moment I thought he would hug it to him, bury his face in it, breathe in his dead child’s smell. Perhaps if I had not been standing there, he would have done. ‘And there’s his rucksack,’ I said, producing it from under the table.

  He shook his head. ‘That’s not his.’

  ‘Are you sure? He took it to the fete with him. It was in the car.’

  ‘That’s not Gavin’s,’ he said emphatically. ‘His backpack is blue, not black, and it’s up in his room. I saw it this …’ His voice cracked again. ‘Thank you, Juno, for talking to me …’ and he rushed out of the shop, leaving the door open, the bell jangling. He was away, down Shadow Lane before I could call out to him, poor man.

  I looked down at the rucksack in my hands and put it back on the table, unclipping the plastic cover. On the inside of the flap a name and address had been carefully painted in block capitals: OLIVER KNOLLYS, 4 DAISON COTTAGES, ASHBURTON. I frowned, fingering the white-painted letters. Who was Oliver Knollys and why did Gavin have his rucksack?

  Judging by the weight, there was something inside. I decided to have a look, undoing the drawstring and peering in. Whatever was in there was cushioned, enclosed in a cloud of bubble wrap. I took off the top covering. I could see white metal, hinged and folded legs, tiny rotor blades: a toy helicopter, perhaps? I lifted it out to get a better look.

  It wasn’t a helicopter. It might be a toy, but if it was, it was a very expensive one. I returned it carefully to its bubble-wrap nest. I knew Daison Cottages, passed them every week on my way to the Brownlows. I didn’t know what Gavin was doing with the contents of Mr Knollys’ rucksack but I intended to find out, and the only way to do that was to return it to its owner.