‘Of course, I suppose we were the only couple at that farm who knew who Harvey Carlyon was.’
‘Harvey Carlyon?’
Beamish knew that he had to be supremely careful what questions he put and how he put them. If he drew attention too sharply to his own ignorance, he might remind them fatally that they were behaving like traitors. Likewise, it would be better if they more than half forgot that he had an official capacity. All the same, there were details on which he knew he might desperately need patient guidance.
‘It’s a Cornish name,’ Laetitia Ledman said, and seemed to think for one exasperating moment that that information was adequate. But she glanced at her sister as if asking permission to proceed.
‘He was a second cousin of Janie Goodwin’s, one generation back.’
‘His father was Wilson Goodwin Senior’s uncle on his mother’s side.’
‘We used to know a lot of what was going on, because we used to hear our father tell our mother.’
‘Our father was a bank clerk, you see.’
‘They knew a lot of things at the bank.’
‘There were people who said that old Wilson Goodwin need never have gone bankrupt. They said it was only a move to put his funds where his creditors could not get at them.’
‘He only paid half a crown in the pound.’
‘Some of his holdings were in his wife’s name. That’s the way it’s often done.’
‘Only you don’t have to overdo it.’
‘And knowing all we do about Jessica Goodwin’s goings-on, we’d never have trusted her with much of our capital, would we, Lois?’
‘Not unless we had her chained to our wrists. So there had to be an intermediary. That was where Harvey Carlyon came in.’
‘He was what they call a nominee. He would sign transfer certificates and hand money over when Wilson Goodwin needed it.’
‘Not the most reliable way of stashing away your treasure,’ Beamish said.
‘Well, of course, Harvey Carlyon must have taken a whacking commission.’
‘Not only that. It was always believed – they certainly believed it at the bank – that Wilson Goodwin had some sort of hold over his uncle. Something he knew about some transaction or other.’
‘You mean blackmail?’
‘We never heard that word used, did we, Laetitia?’
They both looked grave. In the Middle Ages it had been considered obscene to mouth the word ‘plague’.
‘But you can see, Mr Beamish, that what worked for one generation wouldn’t necessarily work with another.’
‘They had a good laugh in the bank when the whisper went the rounds that Harvey Carlyon had done the dirty on his cousin.’
‘It was during the war, and young Wilson Goodwin had had to go into the army.’
‘He did rather well for himself, we believe.’
‘Young Harvey Carlyon did rather well for himself, too, once Wilson Goodwin’s back was turned.’
‘Harvey Carlyon didn’t go into the army.’
‘No. But he was doing war work. He had to keep going abroad.’
‘He liked people to think it was war work –’
‘Now, Lois, be careful what you’re saying. Stick to what you know is true.’
‘He was something to do with economic warfare.’
‘All kinds of things had to do with economic warfare.’
There was now a flush in both women’s cheeks. Something was going on between them that Beamish did not understand.
‘How can you know all this?’ he asked them.
‘It was bank talk. The bank was owed money too. Anyway …’
Lois took a deep breath and brought her narrative back to what, presumably, she thought she knew was true.
‘When Wilson Goodwin was demobilized, he came back to find that the Goodwin capital was a thing of the past. Watch out, Titia – the Sergeant’s hand is hovering near the enfilading key.’
Beamish had taken over the role of invader now, with the wits of the women jointly pitted against him. He lost a whole rank of his flying bulls to flanking fire, much to their exuberant satisfaction.
‘So Wilson Goodwin had to make do for himself.’
‘He went to South America.’
‘As a planter.’
‘Growing coffee.’
‘Well. There are two opinions about that.’
‘Just remember that Mr Beamish is a policeman, Lois.’
‘Some say there’s only one cash crop worth growing where Wilson Goodwin’s been farming.’
‘Lois!’
Laetitia even let her concentration on the electronic game lapse while she impressed a point on Beamish.
‘You must not take too much notice of my sister, Mr Beamish. She watches too much lurid television. We haven’t heard of Wilson Goodwin for years. We think that perhaps he has come back to England because of the latest big arrest of drug-pushers; but that is pure speculation on our part. We think he may have come back to organize a new sales network. I’m afraid we are not always as jealous of our neighbours’ reputations as the Good Book would have us be – but that is only when we are talking between ourselves.’
‘Quite!’ Beamish said, hoping to bring back the conversation to discipline by a firm but friendly tone. Lois’s hand shot out unexpectedly, and one of his vanguard bulls exploded.
‘Your mind’s not on the game, Mr Beamish.’
‘There is one thing that intrigues me,’ Beamish said. ‘Though I dare say you are as puzzled by it as I am.’
‘Oh, we are puzzled by any number of things, Mr Beamish.’
For a few seconds it looked as if their curiosity was going to get the better of their sportswomanship, but Lois’s hand suddenly stabbed at the keyboard.
‘How did Janie Goodwin contrive to get these two men up here?’
‘Ah! I’m afraid you have us there, Sergeant.’
‘I’m assuming that Harvey Carlyon is the one who was seen about in an opulent overcoat. But I have not heard of any public sightings of Wilson Goodwin.’
‘He was certainly there. And you should have seen their faces when they recognized each other. No, I’m afraid we’ve been beating our brains in vain about how she brought it off.’
‘But we do have our theories,’ the other said.
He had to listen to them all – and outlandish was the word for them. Janie had appealed to Harvey Carlyon in the name of her undying love. Or perhaps she had offered to sell him some letters that he had written to her when she had first started travelling abroad in the 1930s. The sisters Ledman clearly read widely in the realms of popular naughtiness. They were less fluent in their theories about what bait might have been held out to Wilson Goodwin. Perhaps his sister had offered him contacts about a shady land-deal in a tract of shooting-moor that nobody used any more. Or maybe she had suggested growing marijuana in some secret corner of Upper Calesdale. Or perhaps he might extend his markets to the young people at the Field Studies Centre. In this seam the ingenuity of the Ledmans was wearing thin. Beamish moved them on to a fresh angle.
‘But when she had finally got you all together at Barker’s Clough – how did she get her brother to agree so readily to settle his debts?’
‘Ah, well –’
‘It was overfacing for them, you know – even for two experienced men like that.’
‘They did not know what was happening to them. Here they were, ushered into this roomful of people, some of them looking pretty ugly.’
‘Even we were wondering what lengths Janie Goodwin was prepared to go to.’
‘Janie was very powerful. Very powerful indeed.’
‘Though her two sisters didn’t help much.’
‘They were too civilized.’
‘Altogether too civilized,’ Laetitia said.
Tall, gaunt and dogmatic, one’s first impression of Laetitia was of undying latterday puritan. What was there about her that made it unsurprising that she should condemn ‘civilization’in anot
her woman? Was this the sort of thing that was meant – the phrase came unbidden into Beamish’s mind – when men used the expression ‘Mosley’s people’?
‘But even in spite of them, the atmosphere was pretty electric.’
‘I know I was scared out of my wits.’
‘It was peculiar, really, because I wouldn’t have said we were a particularly scary bunch.’
‘Yet I could see that both Mr Goodwin and Mr Carlyon kept looking at us furtively.’
‘Even at us two, Mr Beamish. Several times I felt their eyes resting on me.’
‘Fancy anyone being afraid of a couple like us!’
They both giggled.
‘Mind you, I think they truly believed they were going to be hanged. I suppose that makes some difference to a man’s attitude.’
‘They believed they were going to be hanged? You mean that she threatened them in so many words?’
‘Not in so many words. But hanging was very much in the air.’
‘All she actually said was, “By the way, the execution shed’s just across the yard.”’
‘And then that man came up with the lorry.’
‘Now there was a character for you.’
‘He looked just like a public hangman.’
‘Titia – how can you possibly know what a public hangman looks like?’
‘Well – he talked like one. “Right,” he said. “Who’s for the nine o’clock walk? Who am I operating on this morning, ma’am?”
‘“There are two of them,” she said, and you could see they couldn’t be sure whether she was fooling or not.’
Beamish got very little else out of the Ledmans. He gathered that the showdown in Emma Rawlings’s farmhouse had been a tour de force of atmosphere and personality. Janie Goodwin must have effected something akin to mass hypnosis. And the Misses Ledman had been as captivated as anyone present.
It was a relief to come away from their house, to drive up and over the darkened moors. There was one more task that Beamish felt he ought to do before he went to bed. While working on the allotment, he had suddenly thought of a way in which Janie Goodwin could have got out of her cottage without being seen on the Friday morning. He thought it worth an ad hoc memo to Grimshaw.
Sir: We were wondering why the population of Hempshaw End did not see Mrs Cromwell come away from her place on Friday morning – and how Inspector Mosley managed to visit the house unobserved. I think I have hit upon the answer: perhaps Hempshaw End was watching something else at the time.
I propose to make efforts to discover what.
Chapter Eighteen
As Grimshaw came away from his talk with the Cromwells, it looked at first as if Hempshaw End was on its way to church; except that the population was moving in ones, twos and family groups in the opposite direction from St Stephen’s spire. A vicar with modern views on PR might have accompanied his flock towards the mock execution.
Grimshaw had mixed feelings about attending. But he was under no doubt as to where his duty lay. The despatch of Dr Crippen was to be re-enacted in a shed at the back of Sarah Bramwell’s cottage, and he was already within sight of it when he noticed that some people – definitely a minority – were detaching themselves from the main axis of advance. A thin line was straggling towards the exit from the village where Georgina Crane’s schoolhouse lay. His first thought was that this was perhaps a deputation calling on her in protest against this morning’s sadism; obviously she must be a repository for any village problem to which there was apparently no answer.
But this lesser crowd continued on up past the school. When they reached the bridge across the Old Railway, they climbed the wall and let themselves down the embankment towards a plate-layer’s hut by whose door a man and a woman were collecting money.
That was how Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw came to attend Hempshaw End’s rival hanging. It was a very amateurish ceremony – badly conceived, badly staged and badly acted. It was not helped by the fact that there was insufficient room inside the hut for such a spectacle, and if the organizer had not moved the spectators back at the critical moment, at least half a dozen of them would have disappeared into the pit when the trap was sprung.
The effigy was of sacking stuffed with straw, and it was not heavy enough to tauten the rope convincingly as it fell. Its facial features were an elementary daub not meant to represent anyone in particular, but its clothing was an obvious pastiche of Janie Goodwin’s.
A cheer went up when the body slithered off the boards. It was in a good cause: the takings were earmarked for next year’s ‘Blue Peter’charity, whatever that might be.
Georgina Crane did not call on Janie Cromwell until a mature hour of the Monday morning. She found Janie hard at work, clearly using the reorganization of her furniture as an excuse for a more fundamental spring-cleaning than she had undertaken for some years. Not that Janie ever allowed her home to be grubby; there was simply too much in it.
Georgina picked up a small pot that contained a sad-looking specimen of Opuntia versicolor.
‘Doesn’t this need potting up?’
‘On the contrary, I’ve only just potted it down. Sometimes these things prefer their roots held tight, you know.’
Janie was wearing a plastic apron decorated with a poster design for a well-known brand of Worcester sauce. Georgina noticed that under it she was wearing more modern clothes than she usually paraded – not contemporary, by a long chalk – rather in the ‘Granny’ style of a few years ago, which had been some women’s counter to the mini-skirt.
‘So, Janie – you seem to have pulled it off.’
‘There were times when I didn’t think I was going to. And if you hadn’t spotted that piece in the paper about Wilson coming home –’
‘I didn’t know when I showed it you just what I was setting in motion.’
‘I didn’t really believe I’d ever succeed in getting my brother up here.’
‘I wish you’d tell me how you managed it.’
‘Old Emma Rawlings’s farm: I had it passed to him along the vine that that was just another way in which my father had shunted some of his assets into safe keeping. The Rawlingses have always been so scrupulously honest. They’d run the place for years on my father’s behalf. There was an accumulation of profits in the bank, and old Emma Rawlings was worried stiff what she ought to do with them.’
‘Is there a word of truth in that story?’
‘None whatever.’
‘That place at Barker’s Clough hasn’t been farmed for years; not since Rawlings died.’
‘Wilson was not to know that. In any case, I added a few frills. Like that the deeds are worth a mint of money because of the new link that’s going to join the two motorways.’
‘And your brother fell for all that?’
‘He wouldn’t have done if he’d heard it from my lips. He’d have smelled a rat straight away. But I fed it to him through a pair of my sisters. They’re so bored stiff with the lives that they lead, they’ll grab hold of anything that has a touch of spice about it.’
‘But what about your cousin? How did you get him here?’
‘Same story – only he seems to have got hold of the idea that this was another Goodwin holding that ought to have been in his keeping. Funny how some people seem always to get hold of the wrong end of the stick.’
‘Especially when they’re encouraged to.’
Janie had an old-fashioned whistling kettle. It chose this moment to call her into the kitchen. She went and made coffee.
‘It was a queer feeling, seeing Harvey again. It surprised me that I no longer hated him. It also surprised me that I could ever have had any other feeling for him.’
‘But your brother and your cousin didn’t come to blows?’
‘Oh, good heavens, no – that’s not the sort of men they are. They hate each other like poison – but neither’s going to gaol to get even with the other. They are businessmen, Miss Crane.’
‘Janie – why did yo
u have to go to such lengths? Couldn’t you just have wandered off and met them somewhere? Why all the melodrama?’
‘Noll Cromwell,’ Janie said, packing volumes of meaning into three syllables. ‘He had to believe that I was beyond his help – otherwise he’d have been there helping. And I didn’t want that: it could have been fatal. If he had known which two men I was meeting, he wouldn’t have been able to contain himself. Noll’s subtle way of dealing with that sort of tricky situation would have been to issue a few thick ears.’
Janie looked knowingly at Georgina. An outside observer might have concluded that they had known each other very well over a very long period.
‘Besides, I thought it would be no bad idea to have the hills swarming with constabulary. There could have been accidents, and help might have come in useful. It did not occur to me that it was schoolkids the hills were going to swarm with.’
‘You didn’t find it too difficult dodging the cordon?’
‘No – as I told that child that I had to impound – I moved on the extreme flank of the party until they were clear of my danger zone.’
‘I still don’t know how you managed to get out of your cottage in the first place without being spotted by half the village.’
‘Because the village wasn’t looking. It was easy. I know a lorry-driver who likes being a bit of a clown. You know that gallowses have become a hot property in the Hemp Valley of late? Well, there’s an optimistic consortium in the village who are trying to cash in on it in a big way. They fancy themselves as entrepreneurs – but they haven’t much in the way of resources. They have no storage space and no business premises, so, having bought the thing, they decided to store it in the old plate-layer’s hut, where they could also demonstrate it to potential customers. It was transported there on Friday morning – so I persuaded my friend to carry it up on the back of his wagon, all set up for action – and with a body dressed up in my clothes all strapped, noosed and ready for its penitential journey. It drove out of the village by the back way – so you can imagine what everybody was looking at. All I had to do was walk out through my gate. The street was deserted.’
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