Before they moved off from the shelter of the hedge, Janie Goodwin had taken from her pocket an old-fashioned-looking overcoat button, which she had thrown down on the path behind them. It was all part of the game, she told the child, which was a sort of grown-up hide-and-seek. And Brenda knew that grown-ups did sometimes play games. Her aunties and uncles played Murder and Sardines all over the house at Christmas. Everybody was looking for the man in the coat that the button had come off, and when they found this button here, they would all think – quite wrongly – that he had come this way.
Brenda was able to tell Grimshaw very little else. They had walked up to a crossroads where a car was waiting for them, and it had driven them up to an old and rather dirty farmhouse where there were a lot of adults, most of them according to Brenda very old, who were having some sort of meeting in a downstairs room. These were the only unhappy two hours in Brenda’s day’s experience, because Janie Goodwin unaccountably switched off her friendliness for the time being and shut her in an upstairs room which she shared with a woman – Brenda was not perceptive enough to call her young – who proved to be uneasy company. Ferrety was the word that Brenda used to describe her. But she was by no means as felicitous in her descriptions of the other people whom she saw about that house. They seemed to have been an extremely nondescript crew. The only one who had made a vivid impression on her was a short, stocky man in a black hat and a raincoat that did not seem to have any buttons. But she said that he was not there long. She just saw him come and go late in the afternoon, and did not think that he was in the house longer than about a quarter of an hour. Grimshaw managed to suppress his emotions of every kind.
And that was all that coaxing, cajoling and suggestion could get from Brenda Shuttleworth. He came away from the Centre unconvinced that he had gained anything at all by talking to the child.
He also found Elizabeth Stirrup sitting up in bed – and likewise applying herself to a boiled egg. And there came into Grimshaw’s mind a picture of himself lying propped up against Sunday-morning pillows with a spoiled man’s breakfast on a tray in front of him.
Elizabeth Stirrup smiled at him. It was a thin smile, one in which only a deprived optimist would have seen any hint of come-hither. But from their previous, admittedly brief meetings, it was one smile more than Grimshaw had hitherto judged her capable of. Georgina Crane was lingering between him and the bedroom door, and he could see that she would have needed very little encouragement to stay through the coming interview. He reluctantly gave her a very hostile look, whose meaning she grasped at once.
‘Shall I make coffee, Superintendent?’
‘Perhaps later on, please, Miss Crane.’
Miss Crane withdrew. Miss Stirrup looked irretrievably washed-out – in marked contrast to Brenda Shuttleworth’s resilient freshness.
‘I’m sorry to come disturbing your much-needed rest like this, Miss Stirrup. But if you wouldn’t mind filling in a few missing details for me –’
‘Oh, no. Please ask anything you like. I’m afraid I’ve been a bit silly – but apart from that, I fear I’ve nothing exciting to tell you.’
‘Well, let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Tell me how you came to leave this place in the first instance.’
‘Well – I left it. It’s as simple as that, really. I’d made up my mind I had to get away from Hempshaw End. I didn’t feel I could stand the place half an hour longer. It had all started with the shock of last Friday dinner time, and then there was the search-party – and I must say I hated to see the children being dragged into that. I was stupid, I suppose, but I felt that I absolutely had to get away.’
She looked at him wide-eyed – the eyes of a very ingenuous young woman, of a young woman whose life had been unbelievably sheltered. How could any girl have managed that in this part of this century?
‘So I decided to ring the garage, to see if they had a car that would take me to Bradburn Station, but I couldn’t get any reply.’
‘They were all out with me, searching the hills.’
‘That’s what I discovered. But I thought at first it just might mean that their office was not manned, so I decided to walk down there and see if I could find anyone. And that’s where I ran into a motorist who was trying in vain to get attention on the forecourt. I told him what my problem was, and he said he had to make a detour, to call on some friends in the hills, but that he would take me to Bradburn if I didn’t mind the delay.’
‘Can you describe this man?’
Camel-hair Coat.
‘You took a dangerous chance, accepting that kind of lift, Miss Stirrup.’
‘Oh, I know that. If I didn’t know it for myself, Georgina has left me in no doubt. But I can’t describe to you how desperate I was to get away. Besides – he seemed a very civilized type of man – and turned out to be one.’
‘And where did he take you to? Where was this place in the hills?’
‘I couldn’t begin to tell you. There’s such a sameness. To my eyes this is all such a wilderness. One hill’s so much like another, there are no signposts, and the sky was so cloudy that I couldn’t see where the sun was.’
‘Well – try to describe the place itself – the house you were taken to.’
‘A farmhouse, I suppose – but it didn’t seem much of a farm. There was some sort of family party going on – not at all hilarious, you understand – more like a family conference than a party. And it went on a lot longer than was expected. Which was why I wasn’t brought back until during the night.’
She looked at him hopefully – her hope being that he was going to believe her. She was a very poor liar indeed – inexperienced, he guessed, in the most elementary deceit.
‘Am I supposed to believe all that you’ve told me, Miss Stirrup?’
‘I shall be most offended if you don’t.’
A truly schoolmistressly yap.
‘There was a small child at this party, who was not supposed to be there, Miss Stirrup.’
‘I know. And that worried me at first. But she could not have been better looked after, I assure you. She was only there because she had become parted from her school group, and Miss Goodwin had taken her in tow. And she was extremely happy most of the time.’
‘Only most of it?’
‘Both she and I were excluded from the family conference. We were locked away from the others while that was on. I must confess I was worried myself at that stage.’
‘And at encountering Miss Goodwin, I would have thought.’
‘Not really. Apart from her peculiar dress-sense, she is a most natural person.’
‘Didn’t you ask her what she was doing there? What had happened in her cottage last Friday?’
‘At no stage was I alone with her.’
‘What was the family conference about? You were able to form any impressions?’
‘None at all.’
‘You overheard nothing?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘You picked up no hints?’
‘None, Superintendent.’
‘How very convenient.’
‘I do not like your tone, Superintendent.’
‘And I do not care to be obstructed. I shall be back here during the course of today. I hope it will not be necessary to take you elsewhere for questioning, Miss Stirrup.’
Elizabeth Stirrup, Grimshaw felt, was simply at the moment trying to play an old-timer’s game that she would never be able to keep up. She would be the easiest one to trap – his easiest way into the core of the case. But there was no point in sitting storming at her in her present obdurate mood – likely to dissolve into a sickness plea at any moment. He had to build up his background knowledge as fully as he could from anyone who could give him any. Then would be the time, fully primed, to put the pressure on Miss Elizabeth Stirrup.
He had taken the hint from her that Janie Goodwin might also now be back home. He looked for and saw smoke from Janie’s chimney as soon as he rounded the corner that brou
ght it in view. Janie’s living-room had been tidied up, and she was sitting in front of a homely fire with Noll Cromwell. Cromwell was in the same Sunday best as he had worn to make his nocturnal call on Georgina Crane. The pair were drinking Bloody Marys. Grimshaw declined a glass.
‘It’s looking a little different from when I last saw it,’ he said, taking in the room with a sweep of his eyes. He was pretty sure now that somehow, for some reason, she and Cromwell were entirely responsible for everything that had happened. But he did not want to accuse them yet of wasting police time. It would be better to trip them into some self-incriminatory remark that would lead him into it.
‘You’ll have to let us know for the record your precise evaluation of the damage.’
‘No damage at all,’ Janie said.
She had a cultured voice, but it had none of the aggression of the Home Counties giantess. There was, he noticed more and more in the next few minutes, a gentleness about all her manners and attitudes. It contrasted very sharply with all he had led himself to expect of her.
‘No damage at all? Why – the place was a perfect shambles.’
‘A few pieces of furniture knocked over, sir.’
Even the ‘sir’had a subtlety of its own. It was far from insolent – but it was a reminder that she hailed from a different world: where ‘sirs’were as commonplace as they were de rigueur.
‘A settee lying on its back. The legs of a chair mixed up with those of another. It does create an impression of chaos, I agree.’
‘I saw a very large Wedgwood pot in fragments.’
‘Oh – that’s been broken for years. Hasn’t it, Noll?’
Cromwell nodded with exasperating sobriety. ‘Oh, yes. It fell off its bracket in the earthquake, Superintendent.’
‘Earthquake? What earthquake?’
‘It was a slight tremor we had in the 1950s. It didn’t make headlines. I don’t think you were here in those days.’
Grimshaw examined the pair of them silently for a quarter of a minute.
‘Are you preparing the ground for the pretence that nothing untoward has been happening in the Hemp Valley?’
Janie Goodwin looked at him with a hint that there might be a system of steel springs somewhere beneath the gentility. ‘Do you think it brings me pleasure when this sort of thing happens, Superintendent? Such care was taken not to break anything that I can only look on it as some sort of prank.’
Including rabbit’s blood and sheep’s wool?
‘And what about the fish in the window?’ Grimshaw asked.
Mosley had sent a cryptic message via Beamish about the fish in the window. Grimshaw thought he saw the point now. The fish had been put there because it had been absolutely essential to get the hue and cry on the heels of the missing Janie Goodwin without any delay.
‘You are looking at me in a peculiar way,’ Janie said.
‘I’d like to see you draw a fish, Miss Goodwin.’
‘Mrs Cromwell.’
He knew, of course, that he was a fool. He had spoiled what chances, if any, the ploy might have had. If he were to look round now for pencil and paper, she’d take good care that her sketch wouldn’t match the one that had been in the window.
‘They tried to get me into that fish scheme a couple of years ago, but I wouldn’t play. It’s only an excuse for busybodies to get into your home. I’m sorry if you feel we’re wasting your time, Superintendent. But I’ve not laid any complaint and I shan’t be laying any:’
‘Unfortunately, processes aren’t stopped as easily as that, Mrs Cromwell. There’s the matter of abducting a child.’
‘Abducting her? She stopped to talk to me: is that an offence? Then we found that her friends had made off without her, so I made sure she got back to them.’
‘So how would you react to a charge of illegal detention? You kept her locked in a room.’
‘Only for her own safety, Superintendent.’
‘For her safety? What was going on to need locked-door protection?’
‘Nothing. Nothing much happened – as it turned out.’
‘But you are admitting that you were engaged in something you wouldn’t care for us to know about?’
‘Not at all. What was going on was perfectly legal – so legal that you people could have cleared it up forty years ago.’
‘Only it’s difficult to clear things up when you haven’t even heard of them,’ Cromwell said – and looked as if he felt he had scored a point. ‘Come to that, you don’t even know about it yet.’
‘I’m sorry if we seem to be making life difficult for you, Superintendent,’ Janie said. ‘I know how very much you would like to solve a great crime. Well, unfortunately, we can’t provide you with one. Not even a little one. There hasn’t been a crime, Mr Grimshaw.’
For the next twenty minutes or so there was parry and thrust of the same sort of specious debate, until it became repetitive – and very obviously fruitless. He could only say what he had said to Elizabeth Stirrup: he would be back.
‘You’re not going to the big show, then, Superintendent?’ Cromwell asked him, as he was preparing to leave.
‘Big show?’
‘They’re hanging Crippen at Sarah Bramwell’s at eleven. There’s likely to be quite a crowd: everybody worth knowing. What is it they call it – the police presence? I’m sure there’d be a strong case for a police presence.’
Chapter Seventeen
Brenda Shuttleworth stood – with both feet – on the threshold of puberty; and observers of all kinds attest that puberty is happening at a younger age these days than in the earlier years of this century. But whether they are standing before, upon or beyond that threshold, young people travelling on chartered coaches often disappoint their adult escorts when it comes to the appreciation of scenery.
Brenda Shuttleworth – and the rest of her class – were no exception. As their coach pulled out of Hempshaw End, their eyes were not lifted unto the hills. But if they did chance to catch sight of them, the help they received was at least basically similar to the reactions of the psalmist: they sang. They sang in unison but out of tune, any element of close harmony quite involuntary. Their rhythm was insistent, but they omitted any attempt at the syncopation that had first attracted them to the original.
Except Brenda Shuttleworth. Brenda did not sing. She talked. She sat telling her friend Mavis many things which Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw would have loved to have coaxed out of her.
‘There was a great love in her life,’ Brenda said, with a natural mixture of solemnity and matter-of-factness that would have impressed Mavis with her sincerity, if Mavis had been the sort of child who questioned such things.
‘He was a cousin, or something. A cousin, I think. And you know how it is with cousins. You don’t even notice them half the time, and when Miss Goodwin was a girl, and used to live at the Field Studies Centre, she and this cousin used to pass each other in the grounds and not even see each other. But then she went abroad.’
They had just crossed a bridge over one of the upper reaches of the Old Railway. A sheep ran in front of their bus for some yards, bringing their speed down to a walking pace.
‘She was with another lady, an old lady, who was absolutely rolling in money. And they went round looking at churches and ruins and art galleries and that. And they stayed at fabulous hotels, and then this cousin of hers turned up, and this time they did notice each other.’
The sheep finally side-stepped up a bank and disappeared through a gap in a dilapidated wall.
‘It was on the French Riviera.’
It was doubtful whether Brenda could have pinpointed the Côte d’Azur on a map, but she had a mental image of an arc of tall palms and an expansive curving bay. Janie had succeeded in conveying an abiding impression.
‘They had this marvellous summer together, but it was the year the war broke out and the cousin had to come home suddenly because he had business to attend to.’
If Mavis had had any intellectua
l curiosity, she might have wondered at all the things that Brenda and Janie Goodwin had found to talk about in their brief but apparently intense friendship under a hedge near a sawmill. But Mavis did not ask questions. She did not even reveal whether she was taking any interest in Brenda’s story.
‘But Miss Goodwin and her old lady weren’t in a hurry to come home, though anybody could have told them that there was going to be a war in a few days’time. What happened was that they found their way into Switzerland, and Miss Goodwin got some sort of job, for the Red Cross, or something. I think it was the Red Cross. And the old lady died there, and Miss Goodwin was left on her own. But she had enough money to get by on, and she didn’t come home again till the war was over.’
They were driving through a small town now, and some of the girls let down the windows and shouted juvenile provocations at a knot of young men sitting astride their massive Japanese motorcycles round a stone market cross.
‘Then this cousin went and turned up again. In Switzerland. I don’t know what he was supposed to be doing there, and I don’t think Miss Goodwin did either. Of course she was over the moon to see him again – but I could tell how it was going to turn out from the way she talked about it.’
Now they were entering a motorway from a slip road. The minibus loaded with Technical College students overtook them and there was loud shouting from both parties.
‘Of course, she didn’t tell me word for word, but it was pretty obvious what had happened. If she had wanted him as badly as she said she did, she shouldn’t have let him out of her sight in the first place. She should have come home with him when she had the chance, if you ask me. Like most men,’ Brenda said, ‘he wanted it both ways. But Miss Goodwin saw through him in time. She guessed what I’d have known all along – that he must have somebody else at home. What would you do, Mavis, if your boyfriend gave you the big let-down?’
‘Dunno,’ Mavis said. ‘Never thought about it.’
‘I know what I’ll do, if it ever happens to me.’
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