by J. R. Ellis
‘You got rid of Atkins, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, well, he was after Caroline, you know what he was like. That Oldroyd was also asking about the caves: Jingling Pot and Winter’s Gill. Seemed to think there might be a link between the two systems, but I told him there isn’t, is there?’
‘No, there isn’t; Winter’s Gill’s just a dead end.’
‘That’s what I told them.’
Tinsley stretched out, sighed, then drained his beer.
‘Well, it’s all a funny do, but life has to go on. If I don’t get back, Fred will have me. I’m already in his bad books for being late, so I’ll see you.’
With that, he got up and briskly left the pub by the back entrance, leaving Simon Hardiman to contemplate matters alone.
Tinsley had just got outside the door and closed it when a voice said, ‘Stuart.’
Startled, he glanced round. The barmaid – who was also his wife – was standing at the side of the door close to the wall. He looked at her with a mixture of emotions.
‘What do you want, Susan?’
‘You’ve heard about what’s happened?’
‘Obviously, I helped to bring his body up, and I’ve heard about John. It’s all over the village, isn’t it? Not to mention the news.’
She looked down as if too ashamed to say the next words.
‘Stuart, did you have anything to do with it?’
He laughed with bitterness and sarcasm. ‘Oh yeah, sure, I bumped them both off. Stuffed that bastard’s body into the cave and then went down with the police to fetch it up again. And I killed John Baxter for no reason, even though he was a mate of mine. What the hell are you talking about? And what’s it to you anyhow?’
She was still looking down and started to cry.
‘I . . . I was just worried that she might have . . .’
Tinsley said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not listening to any more of this,’ and walked off up the road to Fell Farm.
After crying for a minute, Susan Tinsley wiped her eyes, composed herself and returned to the bar.
As the afternoon went on, the Red Horse became relatively quiet as the lunchtime crush receded, leaving just the odd tourist and a number of locals, mainly of the older retired type. The atmosphere was notably subdued and conversations more hushed as the gruesome events of recent times were discussed.
In the evening it started to fill up again. Sam Cartwright was sitting at the bar. His large grubby hands picked up his pint glass and he drained the contents in two enormous gulps.
‘Trevor!’ he called out. The landlord came over. ‘Another pint in there, ta.’ He handed over his glass. As the host obliged he asked, ‘’Ave those coppers been back again?’
‘Haven’t seen any sign of them for a few days.’
‘I hope they keep out o’ t’way for t’Feast. We don’t want ’em prowling round and spoiling it, but I expect there’s not much chance they’ll stay away now. It’s a bad do about John, in’t it?’
The landlord shook his head. ‘I’ll say.’
‘They’ll be back no doubt, forever asking all their bloody questions. They’d like to pin it all on me but they’ve no bloody chance.’ He rummaged in his pocket and took a cigarette out of a filthy packet. ‘Oh, bugger it, I forgot. We can’t bloody smoke in here any more, can we?’ He stuffed the cigarette back into the packet. ‘I mean we’re all glad to see t’back of Atkins, but John’s another matter. He wor a good bloke.’
Trevor Booth set the pint on the counter. He looked at Cartwright rather quizzically as he handed over the money.
‘I thought you didn’t get on with John Baxter all that well? I’ve heard you cursing him as well for not paying his bills.’
Cartwright looked uncharacteristically taken aback.
‘We sorted all that out, it wor only because I got that drive shaft new. I told him I couldn’t get one second hand; he paid me all right.’ He frowned and turned on to the offensive, his language becoming broader as he got angry. ‘What’s bloody well got into thee? You sound like t’bloody police.’
The barman laughed.
‘You sound like you’ve got a conscience.’
Cartwright realised Booth was joking but was uneasily pacified by the laughter.
‘Gerroff wi’ yer, yer bugger.’
At this point there was a newcomer to the bar. Cartwright turned; it was Geoff Whitaker. He had just finished work in the kitchens and stopped at the bar for a drink before going home.
‘Oh, it’s you.’
‘Pint of bitter, Trevor. Hi, Sam.’ Whitaker’s face still looked drawn.
‘Are you over t’shock yet?’ asked Cartwright sarcastically.
‘Of what?’
‘Finding that bastard dead.’
Whitaker shook his head. He looked tired after his shift and also with the weight of other things on his mind.
‘Not really.’ He paid for his beer.
‘So it was right down in Sump Passage?’
Whitaker sighed. He didn’t want to get on to this topic again but, obviously, people were going to ask him.
‘Yeah. It’s the last thing you’d expect to find so far down. I was just thinking about the party I was taking through and how far we had to go when, bang, I stumbled on him. It gave me a bloody fright, I can tell you.’
The barman shook his head. ‘How do you reckon he got down there?’
Whitaker took his newly pulled pint and drank from it. ‘I’ve absolutely no idea and that’s what I told the police.’
‘I’ll bet you did,’ laughed Cartwright. He had almost drained his glass again and was getting slightly tipsy. ‘We’re suspects, you and me, aren’t we?’ He nodded at Whitaker and leaned over towards him. ‘The police think we could have done Atkins in, but I told them, I made no bones about it, we’re all glad to see t’back o’ t’bugger.’ He laughed again, rolling on his bar stool, but Whitaker seemed angry.
‘Speak for yourself.’
‘Ger away wi’ yer. Yer know bloody well everybody ’ated him. What about you, any road? Wasn’t he after that wife o’ yours?’
‘No.’
‘Well, he were after every bugger else’s.’
‘Look, I don’t want to talk about it, OK?’ Whitaker took up his pint and walked off into another part of the pub. Cartwright turned back to the bar.
‘What the bloody hell’s the matter with him?’
Trevor Booth was drying glasses and waiting to pull Cartwright’s next pint.
‘Don’t know; stress, I suppose. Can’t have been a nice thing, finding a body like that.’
Cartwright tapped the side of his nose. ‘Bit weird though; maybe he knows more than he’s letting on.’
‘Geoff Whitaker? You’re joking.’
Cartwright grunted. ‘Yer never know; ever thought it funny that he stumbled on t’body down there? Maybe him and some of his mates in t’club cooked up a plan to bump Atkins off.’ He exploded in laughter immediately, realising he had made a weak joke. ‘“Cooked up”, him being a chef, get it?’
‘Yes, absolutely hilarious. And then what happened? He led the police to the body? I don’t think so.’
‘Well, I don’t trust him anyway, I’m sure Atkins were knocking his wife off.’
‘That may be, but just lay off Geoff. I can’t afford to have him off work with stress or something because people like you are making out he might have done it.’
The big mechanic took up his glass and drained it again. ‘Off with stress, my bloody arse. Anyway, I’m off. See you tomorrow.’
‘See you, Sherlock, leave something for the police to do.’
‘Bugger off!’ Cartwright called out good-humouredly as he lurched off down the passageway where he’d confronted Oldroyd and Carter.
Trevor actually felt rather deflated when Cartwright left and he followed him down the passage to get a bit of air. He stood looking out into the night at the dark mass of the fell opposite. Cartwright could be a nuisance, but he was wha
t was usually known as a colourful character and some relief was needed. Tension hung over the village like winter mist on the fells. Two murders discovered within a week; it was enough to shake any community, but especially a small one like this where everyone was known to everyone else. And there was the terrible question that no one liked to contemplate: Who next? Booth shook his head and returned to the comforting light of the bar where he served himself a whisky and continued to dry the glasses.
As Cartwright walked across the village green opposite the pub, his mood darkened as he remembered that there was very little prospect of ever getting back the money that Atkins owed him. And these bloody murders making everyone jumpy and whispering in corners. What the hell for? Surely they weren’t sorry about Atkins. John Baxter maybe, but people were looking worried as if they thought they might be next. He laughed grimly to himself; they were just a bunch of cowards.
He made his way to his small terrace house on the edge of the village. Here he lived a bachelor existence and the inside of the house was as chaotic and filthy as his garage workshop. In fact, he had so many tools and bits and pieces of engines strewn around that the two places were almost indistinguishable.
His route home took him past his garage and he usually stopped to have a quick look round and check if everything was OK. It was an overcast night and very dark as he approached the garage, which appeared as a black shape against the sky. He had a quick glance down either side of the building and was about to carry on home when he noticed a light flashing through a dirty window. He frowned and unconsciously clenched his fist. There was someone in there; someone had broken in.
Cartwright had no thoughts about phoning the police. He was going to tackle ‘t’bugger’ himself. He edged his bulk as carefully and quietly as he could down the side of the building, picking his way between the just-visible car bodies and piles of old tyres and scrap metal. As he reached the back, he saw that the padlock on the somewhat rickety door had been forced. He peered into the workshop and saw the back of a figure who was shining a torch on to tools stored on a roughly made rack on the greasy wall. He burst angrily inside.
‘What the ’ell do yer think yer doin’ in ’ere!’
The figure turned. It might have frightened a more easily scared person than Cartwright. It had a stocking over its face and it immediately grabbed a hammer from the rack.
‘Put that down, yer bugger, and piss off.’
Cartwright had picked up a much more impressive sledgehammer that was lying by the door and looked ready to use it. The figure dropped the weapon and darted out of the workshop; Cartwright could hear footsteps sprinting down the road. Muttering ‘bastard’ to himself, he checked to see if anything was missing but it seemed not. As he searched for a replacement padlock in a tin under his workbench, he suddenly smiled to himself. The break-in had given him an idea.
Five
Don’t go thinking tha’s bold and brave,
Tha’ll tremble and shake afore Yorda’s Cave.
The next day found Oldroyd driving across the hills from Harrogate to Skipton. It was a beautiful late-summer day; the sky was blue and huge billowing white clouds were blowing in from the west. As Oldroyd drove over Blubberhouses Moor there were wide views across the moorland landscape. It was an open, airy scene and Oldroyd felt invigorated as he contemplated the contrast between this lightness and space and the dark constricted world of the caves that was the focus of the investigation. More prosaically, it was good to get away from the office and the pressure to get results.
He passed the sinister golf ball radomes of the Menwith Hill American intelligence base from where, it was rumoured, every telephone conversation in Britain could be monitored. The idea amused Oldroyd, who imagined innumerable Americans wearing headphones and chewing gum while listening to tedious and, to them, incomprehensible conversations.
‘I’m just popping into the Bell for a swift half.’ ‘It’s a fortnight since I saw the in-laws.’ And so on.
Today Oldroyd was pursuing a different kind of intelligence. He needed to know more about the cave systems around the area of the crime and his visit to the Hardimans had yielded little in that direction. He was going to Skipton to visit a bookshop run by a classic Yorkshire eccentric, Gilbert Ramsden. He was a man who might be able to help.
Oldroyd liked to browse in the shop whenever he had the time and was in the area. This time he had a professional reason for his visit. Ramsden specialised in books about Yorkshire. No one living knew more about the county. His bookshop was a legendary place: a rabbit warren of dusty rooms and passageways. No point in looking for bestsellers or romantic novels; most of the stock comprised old editions of local history and ancient maps. As the shop was usually almost deserted, exactly how Ramsden made a living was a mystery, but he was always there to welcome you and answer any kind of questions about Yorkshire. Oldroyd planned to put him to the test today.
He arrived in Skipton to find that it was market day and stalls lined the main street leading up to the parish church and castle. He walked past the greengrocers and crockery sellers and stopped briefly to buy some Wensleydale cheese at a specialist stall. Then he headed off down one of the passageways or ‘ginnels’ that led from the main street down towards the canal, a picturesque section of the long route from Leeds to Liverpool.
The bookshop was almost hidden in an old cobbled square, deliberately avoiding the brasher commercialisation of the High Street as if ensuring that only the genuinely interested and persistent would discover its treasures.
The building was very old. Above the door was the date 1659 carved into the stone, and the initials ‘WD’, presumably those of the builder. Oldroyd went in and, sure enough, there was Gilbert Ramsden sitting behind a table by the door. He wore a tweed flat cap and a waistcoat with a pocket watch. His precise age was difficult to determine, but Oldroyd remembered coming into the shop with his father when he was a boy and Ramsden being there then, and scarcely looking any different. He had to be well over eighty. His long sideburns and rimless glasses gave him the appearance of a Victorian antiquarian, which in a sense was what he was: a relic from a different age, a pre-digital, book-based, literary age. He was eating wine gums from a paper bag on the table and reading an ancient-looking tome, which seemed, going by the illustrations Oldroyd could see, to be about Yorkshire church architecture.
Oldroyd surveyed the shelves crammed with volumes of different colours, shapes and sizes and felt a reassuring familiarity. To a man whose formative years were in the pre-computer age, it felt good to escape the keyboard and the screen, if only briefly, and re-enter the sensuous, physical world of books you could hold and feel the weight of as you turned the pages. There was also the texture and pungent musty smell of the paper. How long would it be before people who enjoyed browsing in places like this were regarded as being as odd as Gilbert Ramsden himself? It was a strange feeling to be on the cusp of such a profound change after five hundred years of the printed book.
‘Good morning, Chief Inspector. Can I help you?’
Ramsden had a remarkable memory for faces and seemed to remember everyone who came into his shop. Oldroyd came out of his reverie and turned to the bookseller, who was looking at him curiously.
‘Good morning. I hope so, Mr Ramsden.’ Oldroyd maintained a certain formality with people of Ramsden’s generation. ‘By the way, I enjoyed your talk to the Harrogate Local History Society on the Pilgrimage of Grace.’
‘Ah yes, I remember. Last March, wasn’t it? Very nice people.’
His speech was slow and precise, rather genteel with soft Yorkshire vowels.
‘Was it about the Pilgrimage of Grace you wanted to ask me? I understand research is still going on into how many joined Robert Aske from the Dales area. There were some very nasty reprisals from Henry after he’d betrayed Aske and had him executed at York.’
Betrayal and exploitation of the north by the south: that was a familiar theme over the centuries, thought Oldroyd, and not just i
n 1536. But there was no time to pursue that. The problem with Ramsden was that if you got him on to one of his favourite topics, of which there were many, it could be difficult to get him off it again.
‘No, it wasn’t that. I’m currently investigating the murders in Burnthwaite and I believe you can help me with the enquiry.’
‘Oh.’ Ramsden looked rather surprised. Oldroyd hastened to reassure him.
‘I don’t mean in the normal sense of that phrase. You must have read that the body of the first murder victim was found in a pothole system in Wharfedale.’
Ramsden offered the bag of wine gums to Oldroyd, who thanked him and selected a bright green one.
‘Yes. Very strange; I read about it, of course. The body was found a long way into the Jingling Pot system, wasn’t it? Those caves are unique, you know, nothing like them anywhere else in England or even the world, for that matter; beautiful, awe-inspiring. Do you know how it got there?’
‘Sorry?’ replied Oldroyd, who had followed Ramsden’s ramblings with interest.
‘I beg your pardon, I mean the body. Do you know how it got into that cave system?’
‘We don’t. That’s the question that’s still baffling us. But I think the answer lies in the system itself, and if we find the answer I believe that will also lead us to the murderer.’
‘I see.’ Ramsden looked impressed but puzzled. ‘But I’m not sure how I can help you.’
‘Look . . .’ Oldroyd began.
‘Please sit down, Chief Inspector.’ Ramsden got up heavily and shuffled across the room to bring over another chair. He was wearing a faded corduroy jacket and a waistcoat that fitted tightly around his ample belly.
‘Thank you. You see, the thing is, as I’m sure you will appreciate,’ said Oldroyd, speaking in Ramsden’s quaint, ornamental, circumlocutory style, ‘that you have to approach the whole thing logically and eliminate the possibilities. We’re reasonably sure that he wasn’t murdered down there, or carried all that distance to be dumped in the main passage. That only leaves one possibility.’