Murder Near Slaughter

by L. A. Nisula

  All right, then I’d begin at the beginning, or at least as close to the beginning as I knew. The body had been left in Mr. Elliott’s flat. Why? To make him look guilty or to point away from the actual killer? Did that mean that wherever he’d been killed would somehow point to the killer? Or had it simply been convenient? It seemed there were a lot of people in Eybry with reason to resent Mr. Hoyt. Was leaving him somewhere where there was such a small grudge chance or some part of the strategy? There had to be something I was missing, but I had no idea what it was.

  My thoughts were interrupted as I passed the churchyard and spotted Constable Edwards poking through the longer grasses. So he had come along. I went to the gate, careful to keep out of his way, and called to him. “Hello!”

  He looked up and waved. “Miss Pengear. I wondered when I’d run into you.”

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “The inspector mentioned he’d seen you when he sent me out here to have a look around. You do find the most interesting corpses. This one seems particularly well-traveled.”

  “I thought so, but I hope Inspector Wainwright wasn’t too difficult.”

  “Not to me, but he was annoyed with Sergeant Harris for not figuring out that the body had been moved at least five times before he saw it.”

  I laughed. “Better him than you.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I was hoping to see you, though. Mrs. Albright found out a bit of village gossip I thought you might pass on to the inspector.”

  “Happy to. Mind if I keep looking while I listen?”

  “Not at all.” I leaned against the stone wall around the churchyard and gave him all the details of the gossip Mrs. Albright had picked up.

  When I’d finished, Constable Edwards leaned back on his ankles. “Well, it seems we’ll be checking Mrs. Hoyt’s alibi more carefully. And a few of the husbands in the area, I would think.”

  “You don’t have to tell him you heard it from me if it’s easier.”

  He laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind. And while you’re here, do you remember how Mr. Elliott and Mr. Reynolds said they moved the body through here?”

  “I assumed they carried him, but I don’t think they said. Mr. Reynolds dragged him to Mulberry Cottage, but I had the impression that was out on the lane.”

  “Anything about the route they took?”

  I thought back. “Mr. Reynolds said he found him leaning up against the gate, had trouble opening it to get into the yard, and then dragged him down the lane to the cottages and dropped him at Mulberry Cottage. I don’t think Mr. Elliott was that specific, but it would make sense that he just tipped him over the wall there. I mean there’s almost a direct route from the back door of his shop to here, so that makes sense.”

  “That fits with what they told the inspector.”

  “I take it there was a reason for the question?”

  “A button. I found it over there.” He pointed to the gate closer to the front of the yard then held the button up for me to see that it was a small brass button. “Still shiny, so it hasn’t been out here long. The victim wasn’t missing any buttons; I thought it could be one of theirs. But that doesn’t seem to be the route they took, so probably not a clue. More likely a parishioner or even the vicar himself. The groundskeeper doesn’t seem the sort to wear something with this. Oh well, it seemed promising. I’ll keep it of course, in case it does end up mattering. Did you have anything else you didn’t want to tell the inspector?”

  “That was it, but if we learn anything else, I’ll be sure to let you know. And we have plenty of tea and cake at Oakwood Cottage if you want some.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Constable Edwards went back to searching, and I continued on my way into Eybry.

  Once I’d gotten far enough away from the churchyard that I didn’t feel as if I were being watched and reported on by Constable Edwards, I started thinking about what I could do next to convince the villagers that I wasn’t involved in the murder, or at least make my involvement seem so foolish and convoluted that it wouldn’t work even for gossip, which would most likely make Inspector Wainwright begin to wonder if I was involved just to be annoying, but him I could deal with. Working backwards had worked quite well for me so far. I’d gotten the body from the hearth rug in Oakwood Cottage to Mr. Elliott’s shop. Perhaps I could follow its path back just a little bit farther.

  So why had Mr. Hoyt been hidden in Mr. Elliott’s flat? Perhaps that was the wrong question for me to be asking. Inspector Burrows did say that motive was the least important aspect of solving a crime. Perhaps I should be looking at something else. Like how Mr. Hoyt ended up there. The body had to have been brought there somehow. That was something to look at, how it could have been accomplished. No matter what the motive for leaving him there, he had to have gotten to the shop somehow: either dropped there, as I thought more likely, or under his own power to be killed there, if I was wrong about Mr. Elliott. Either way, it seemed a place to start.

  Now that I was thinking about it, the front of the shop could be ruled out. If Mr. Hoyt had gone into the shop through the front door on his own, someone would have seen. We were noticed when we were walking through the village, and even if no one wanted to tell Inspector Wainwright, I doubted anyone could resist saying to their neighbor that they’d seen Mr. Hoyt go into the shop the morning he was killed. And had the killer carried the body down the high street, he would have been noticed by several people, recognized, greeted, and questioned, and all that before going into the shop where Mr. Elliott or one of his clerks would most likely have been standing ready to greet customers. No, the killer would have had to sneak the body in through the back of the shop and up the stairs, and would have had to either know the running of the shop well enough to time the break-in or have found someplace to watch from and determine when it was safe to slip inside. Either way, he couldn’t have carried the body very far without being noticed. And if Mr. Hoyt had gone there on his own, it was the only way he could have entered without being seen. So that was where I would begin. Another look at the small streets behind the shop where it would be possible to move a body to the back of the cheese shop. Somewhere there I ought to be able to find some clue about the crime scene.

  I had to walk almost all the way back to the churchyard before I found a street that connected to the one I’d taken behind the cheese shop, but I did manage to find one in the end, which was good as I didn’t want to explain where I was going to Constable Edwards, who would certainly have asked if I’d returned to the area around the churchyard so soon. The very things that had made it a good route for Mr. Elliott when he was moving the body—the lack of cross streets, the backs of houses facing it, the remoteness—meant that it would be tricky for someone to access the street and bring a body to the shop along it, unless he’d been killed in the churchyard or one of the houses.

  I remembered what Miss Dyer had said about his womanizing. It was possible one of these houses had been his destination, and he had been killed either by the woman he was meeting or her husband, but then why move the body to the shop? It seemed quite a ways to go and quite a risk that the back door would be open. Even if they were hoping to find any door open, there weren’t many choices, and from all but the houses closest to the high street, it would have been faster to walk out towards the river and leave him in a field, or the churchyard.

  Unless I was making things too simple. Mr. Hoyt had hardly followed a straight line from Mr. Elliott’s shop to our sitting room at Oakwood Cottage; why would he have gone straight from the crime scene to the shop? But, as I looked up and down the small street, I decided that made it even more unlikely he’d been murdered in one of the houses. If they had left the body somewhere out here, who would have stumbled over it and decided to move it? I’d been down this street twice, both times at hours when one would expect people to be walking around or going home, and I hadn’t seen a single person. It’s wasn’t impossible, but I still though
t I’d have better luck checking the area just behind the shop in case he had been killed there and hidden in the nearest available space, although it wouldn’t hurt to find out if any of the residents of the houses I was passing were rumored to be connected to Mr. Hoyt.

  When I got to the street behind the shops, I could hear the sounds of people going in and out from the main street, but I didn’t see anyone. I was fairly certain the first shop I passed was the bakery, but the back door was closed so I couldn’t be certain. I started trying to count the doors from the corner, hoping to be able to tell which of the doors was Mr. Elliott’s, but I was quite surprised to find that Mr. Elliott had left the back door to his shop open again. One would think, after having a body smuggled in, the small inconvenience of opening and closing a door would seem worth the effort. But it did mean it was something he did regularly, so the killer may have been aware of this and counting on it to hide the body. That was something else to find out: Who was aware that Mr. Elliott habitually kept his back door open? And was there normally someone in the back room who would notice? Now that I’d thought of it, it seemed a good thing to test, so I poked my head inside.

  The storeroom of the shop was empty, but I could see straight through to the small central area by the stairs and on into the shop itself, which seemed to be doing a fairly brisk business. Mr. Elliott went past the open door, crossing from the sales floor to the counter with one of the small lunch hampers I’d looked at. As he passed, he glanced in my direction and spotted me. I wasn’t certain whether to slink away or pretend nonchalance and wave. Before I’d decided, he’d leaned over, presumably to deposit the hamper on the counter, and came into the back of the shop.

  “Miss Pengear?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” When he didn’t say anything else, I realized he was waiting for an explanation. “I was coming into the village to get something for us to have at the cottage in the morning, and I thought I’d see if I could determine how Mr. Hoyt ended up in your flat.”

  “By sneaking around behind my shop?”

  “That does seem to be the way the murderer did it. Although I must say, you spotted me very quickly. Do you normally keep an eye on this door?”

  “Naturally. The delivery boys come through to get what’s been ordered from the cottages, and I need to be able to get their invoices.”

  “But not watching for intruders?”

  “It’s a quiet village and a quiet street. No one but delivery boys go past. Theft has never been a problem. And I certainly wasn’t expecting to have a body dropped off.”

  “And that day?”

  Mr. Elliott glanced back towards the shop, probably hoping there would be some emergency that would give him an excuse to get away from me. There wasn’t. He turned back. “It was open, yes.”

  But of course he couldn’t watch it continuously. Although it did lead to an interesting question. “How did you end up finding the body upstairs?”

  “Were you planning on purchasing something, miss, or just distracting me from my other customers?”

  I glanced into the shop. There was no one there now except for the clerk. It would buy me a few more minutes, at least. “Do you have any hampers that are suitable for breakfast?”

  “I think there’s one with some jams and scones and a fig cake. I could add a loaf of Mrs. Greene’s bread if you’d like.”

  At least he was being polite. “That sounds like just what we need.”

  I followed Mr. Elliott into the shop and watched as he retrieved the hamper in question and spread out the contents for me to approve of then wrote out a receipt for me. As I was counting out my money for him, he relented. “If you must know, I keep a small amount of change locked in the desk in there, and most of the excess upstairs. A group of ramblers had come in and paid with large-denomination bills, which took all of my remaining coins. I think it was the first stop on their journey and they hadn’t thought ahead. When they left, I sent Darby, one of my clerks, upstairs to lock away the larger bills and bring down some smaller ones. He found Mr. Hoyt and came to get me. And yes, he helped me move him to the churchyard. No, he is not here today; his nerves, as I’m sure you can understand. Kenwick here also helped move him, but I won’t have you questioning him; I can’t do with two clerks down with nervous disorders. Now if you’ve finished?”

  “I have, thank you.” I could always find Mr. Kenwick later and see how his version of events fit with what Mr. Elliott had told me, although Mr. Darby would be more useful, having found the body, but was also more inaccessible. Still, you couldn’t fault someone for having a nervous attack after finding a dead body, and it was quite possible they would both simply agree with everything their employer had said. “It’s not particularly nice to find a body in your living space.”

  That caused him to relent a little. “I suppose you would know, wouldn’t you? Enjoy the hamper.”

  “Thank you.” I picked up the hamper and walked straight out through the back of the shop, cutting through the back room and back out to the small street. If Mr. Elliott found that odd, he kept it to himself. He was probably just glad to be rid of me.

  The hamper was small enough that it didn’t hinder my investigating. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to investigate. I passed two more shops, both with their back doors securely closed, then a small alley that led back out to the high street, presumably used by the delivery boys as I couldn’t imagine them running all the way to the churchyard and back to get to the back door of Mr. Elliott’s shop, and if they used the front door, there was no need to leave the back open. Beyond that, there were the backs of a few more shops, and the small street dead-ended into a wall. From the stone, it seemed to be the side of the pub, although I didn’t see a way in. Of course, if there was a way from the pub directly into this street, Mr. Hoyt was likely to know it. But he would have had to have been meeting his killer. The area was too small for anyone to have hidden, and as the street was so narrow and featureless, it would have been hard to follow someone without being noticed, particularly as there was next to no foot traffic to hide in. Still, it was best to be thorough as I was here.

  I made a slow circuit of the end of the street, looking for any signs there had been any sort of disturbance, or fight, or murder, but I didn’t see anything that would have been suggestive. More importantly, as I was walking around, looking at the ground, the door to the shop nearest me opened and a clerk in a blue apron and shirt sleeves looked out. “Oh, hello, are you lost?”

  I took that to mean he hadn’t just decided to get a bit of fresh air but had heard me moving around. “Just looking. Thank you, though.”

  He looked confused but went back inside. I thought it best to leave before he told everyone inside and someone else came out who wouldn’t be so easy to get rid of. Besides, the alley between the shops seemed worth investigating, and it would be more interesting than walking all way back to the churchyard.

  I found the alley again easily enough, but the ground was so covered in footprints and various bits of things dropped by delivery boys or blown in from the street, it was hard to tell if anything unusual had happened there. That left logic. If he had been killed in the alley, would the crime have been noticed from the street? The alley was fairly shallow, but if it had been done quickly, perhaps as part of a fight, it might have made sense to drag him back to the street behind the shops. But why choose Mr. Elliott’s when there were others closer? I suppose it would depend on how many other doors were open. I stepped to the back of the alley and looked around, trying to imagine how a murder could have happened there.

  I was trying to figure out how someone could be strangled in an alley so small without realizing what was about to happen in time to fight back when I heard my name called. I looked up to see Miss Hayworth and Miss Dyer passing the alley from the high street. So much for not being noticed while you strangled someone. I came out of the alley as if I’d been intending to all along. “Hello.”

  “Considering a bite to eat?” Mi
ss Dyer asked as I approached. Apparently she intended to ignore the strange place she’d found me. Perhaps she knew I was investigating.

  I realized I’d been right and we were standing quite near the pub. It did seem much more inviting than it had been when I’d come this way before, and getting something there would mean Mrs. Albright and I didn’t have to cook tonight. “I thought I might bring something back to the cottage, but I wasn’t sure...”

  “It’s quite respectable now,” Miss Hayworth assured me. “Just like it was when Mrs. Hoyt’s father ran it.”

  “And she’s using his old fish and chips recipe,” Miss Dyer added. “We’re thinking of bringing some home ourselves. I’m in the middle of a landscape, and Nora has two articles on deadline.”

  I really did not feel like preparing a meal after the day I’d had. “You’ve convinced me.”

  “Excellent. Come with us and we’ll introduce you to Mr. Brunner. He’s the barman.” Miss Dyer tucked her arm through mine and pulled me along, with Miss Hayworth leading the way.

  We’d barely started walking again when the door to the pub burst open and Sergeant Harris stormed out and off down the street, ignoring two people who’d paused to greet him.

  “What’s he so upset about,” Miss Dyer murmured as we started towards the door. “He should have known they’d leave the case to the new fellow.”

  Miss Hayworth snorted. “Any sensible person would know that, but when have you known him to be sensible?” She turned to me. “And so now we have our Scotland Yard man.”

  I nodded. “Have you met him?”

  They both nodded.

  “Just now,” Miss Hayworth said. “He seems very...competent.”

  “He is a very good detective.” They both gave me quite a startled look and I quickly explained, “I do typing for Scotland Yard in London. I’ve met several of them.” No point in telling them I’d also been involved in more than a few cases with him.