Murder in the Goblins' Playground

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  “Oh?”

  “Out of nowhere, he tosses in a comment about…” Woodcock leaned closer and whispered, “…Goblins’ Playground.”

  Ravyn arched his eyebrows.

  “Troublemaker,” Woodcock grunted.

  “What sort of man was Allan Cutter?” Ravyn asked.

  “Bit of a cut up, could be mean when drinking, bit of a temper at times,” Woodcock answered. “That’s what got him barred now and then, that temper of his.”

  “He was presently barred, I think you told DS Stark?”

  “For life.”

  The faintest of smiles almost made it to Ravyn’s lips. He well knew what these village pubs were like. The owner saw himself as lord of his domain, barring or granting favours on whims, yet always knowing he was more beholding to his regular customers than they to him. A customer might get barred, even for life, but a man like Woodcock knew that barring Cutter for any real length of time was nothing less than picking his own pocket.

  “How often did Cutter come in?” Ravyn asked. “When he was not barred, I mean.”

  “It was a rare night when he didn’t come in.”

  “Heavy drinker?”

  “He could be,” Woodcock admitted. “I usually cut him off or steered him toward a free shandy before he got too bad.”

  “And when you couldn’t?”

  “He had strong opinions and quick fists.”

  Ravyn nodded. “He live in the village?”

  Woodcock shook his bald head. “Some ratty old caravan out in the woods somewhere.” He paused the briefest of moments. “Don’t rightly know where. Allan kept himself to himself, and he wasn’t the kind to encourage visitors.”

  “What did he do to keep afloat?”

  “Anything,” Woodcock replied. “Everything. Sort of an all-around Jack, you might say. Bit of gardening, some repairs or light building, a little hauling and porting in an old white van, when he could get it running and afford a few gallons of petrol. He’d do anything, long as it wasn’t too hard and didn’t require more than a couple of day’s commitment. I sometimes let him work off part of a tab with odd jobs and a bit of carpentry now and then.”

  “Surprised he could afford to come in as often you say,” Ravyn observed. “Today’s money doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

  Woodcock sighed the aggrieved sigh of a modern businessman victimised by the vicissitudes of a cruel economy. “Well, he was always in arrears, sometimes as much as twenty quid, no more than thirty. When pressed, as I sometimes had to do, he would find cash somehow and bring himself down to four of five…something I can overlook, for awhile.”

  “In a caravan?”

  “Yeah, but ratty, so I’m told, not much better than a shed.”

  “Folk in the village?”

  “Well, he was raised by Lillian Nettle.”

  “The librarian?”

  “Yeah, but she weren’t his mum, just a foundling, left in a bin,” Woodcock said. “If you know Lillian Nettle any, then you know why Allan run off. Stern. When we were kids in the library, we stayed quiet or got sore knuckles. We figured Allan got more than that, so when he vanished it weren’t no surprise.”

  “He went away?” Ravyn asked. “Where?”

  Woodcock shrugged. “I never asked, he never told. Cutter was not a man you asked questions of. Like I said, he kept himself to himself. Always did, even as a lad. We learned early on not to rag him about being found in a bin; ‘course that was just a rumour, you understand. Or anything about his home life. Those that did felt his fists, and anyone who said anything about his dad got worse.”

  “Father unknown?”

  “Just some bloke named Handsome Stranger, if you get my drift,” Woodcock said with a wink.

  “And the mum?” Ravyn asked. “His real mum.”

  “Wasn’t then like it is now, you know that, Mr Ravyn,” the publican said. “Still a badge of shame back in those days, preggers with no man around. Now the girls just get an NHS flusher, don’t they? Not so easy back then, so into the bin goes little Allan Cutter, or so as Miss Nettle named him.”

  “Cutter came back after…” Ravyn let the question hang.

  “He was gone about two years, then pulled a caravan into the woods, and that was that. Been there, maybe fifteen years.”

  “He have any friends?” Ravyn asked.

  “Not so to speak,” Woodcock replied. “He had mates he would chat up here while drinking, maybe play darts, nothing much more than that. I can give you those names if you want.”

  “I do.”

  Woodcock waited a moment, then said: “Don’t you need to get a notepad of something?”

  Ravyn shook his head. “No need.”

  “You have that good a memory?”

  “I have an excellent memory, Mr Woodcock,” Ravyn said. He smiled gently. “I remember everything.”

  Doubtful of the claim, but nervous nonetheless, Woodcock gave the names of three of the men in the snug that evening, plus a few others. Absent, of course, was the Major’s, who was not anyone’s mate, despite what he like to think.

  “But, like I said, Mr Ravyn, he weren’t close to none of them,” Woodcock said after the last name. “Close to no one really. Well, there was Smith, but it’s not like they were friends or anything.”

  “Smith?” Ravyn frowned. Smith was a common enough name in England, but not in Ashford. “Who’s that?”

  “Ray Smith,” Woodcock explained. “Got an old cottage out by the edge of the woods, end of a path off of Old Pike Road.”

  “If they were not friends, what was the relationship?”

  “Comrades in solitude would be the best way to put it, I guess,” Woodcock replied. “Cottage and caravan not far from each other. They was mates as kids, along with the butcher’s daft daughter. If Cutter had a big job, something that would take more than two or three days, he’d ask Smith for help, and they would split the money on it.”

  “What’s Smith’s game otherwise?” Ravyn asked,

  “It’s not really for me to say how a man earns his bread and beer, now is it, Mr Ravyn, especially when a man don’t come in here and talk about anything to me,” Woodcock said. “I don’t suppose he has said more than a couple dozen words to me. Just holds up his fingers for how many bottles of whiskey he wants, or grunts how much he wants for a brace of coney or some pheasants he’s come by somehow.”

  “Local poacher, then?”

  “I don’t ask, Mr Ravyn, and he don’t tell,” the publican avowed. “None of my business, is it?”

  “No, I suppose not,” Ravyn admitted, lips curving into a sly smile. “How far out on Old Pike is that path?”

  “Mile, maybe a wee bit more, to the south.”

  “All right, Woodcock, I think that’s all for the moment,” Ravyn said. He started to go, then turned. “You have rooms, don’t you?”

  Woodcock licked his suddenly dry lips and nodded.

  “Good.”

  * * *

  Detective Sergeant Leo Stark, leaving the public bar of the Three Crowns, felt as if he had been pulled through a wringer. He had heard of Oscar Lent, one of the richest men in Stafford, but had never met him until tonight. He doubted he would soon forget the meeting, but he hoped Lent would remember Ravyn’s name more than his own. It was, he realised, a slim hope.

  Tessie knew who Lent was, could even give the number of his office from a card Woodcock kept behind the bar, but not the names or numbers of any of his party, about a dozen people. Stark had tried to gather the information discreetly, but that did not work out well. Not at all.

  Stark had no doubt that Lent would carry through on his threats, but hoped his name would not be whispered into the ear of the Chief Constable along with Ravyn’s.

  “You lads head on out,” Stark told the two constables at the door, taking their lists.

  “Night, Sergeant,” they said.

  Stark glanced at the names, then folded the lists into the one he had made inside the pub. He rather
doubted their killer was among the names, but that was for Ravyn to figure out. There were a few motors in the car park, all rather posh, not surprising since locals would not drive to the pub. Ravyn had not asked him to take down registration numbers, but by now he knew it was the kind of thing Ravyn expected him to think of on his own. He walked among the autos, writing the numbers by the light of his torch, then started for the snug entrance.

  It was closed up and dark, which was expected—Woodcock had come into the public some time ago. He was surprised, however, that Ravyn was nowhere to be seen. Given the amount of time it took to check driving licenses, he thought Ravyn might meet him in the pub or at least the car park so they could discuss the case, plan their next moves before calling it a night.

  When the two constables drove off in their panda car, all that remained of a police presence was their own motor in the car park and him standing outside the closed snug, wondering what to do. He thought about going back into the pub and pulling a pint, but the probability of facing Lent again, or Ravyn coming in, soured that idea. At the Met, his guv’nor was not above a wee drop while on the Queen’s coin, but, as he quickly discovered, Ravyn was nothing like his old guv. He considered calling his wife, but dismissed it immediately. What could he tell her? That he was stuck in some benighted god-forsaken village waiting till Ravyn showed up from doing god-knows-what? Aeronwy was already in a foul mood from him being called out after supper. He put his mobile back in his pocket. No sense dumping paraffin on a small fire.

  The temperature dropped quickly. Stark shivered in his too-thin overcoat. It had served him well enough in the City, but the country was colder. He was sure of that. It was one more thing to loathe about being sent to Coventry. A light mist rose, flowing through the dark narrow lanes of Ashford. He shivered again, but this time not entirely because of the cold.

  A footfall scraped against gravel. Stark whipped about. He saw a dim light bobbing in the mist, moving toward him.

  “It’s me, Stark,” Ravyn called, his voice soft as a breeze.

  “Oh, there you are, sir.” Stark tried not to let his sense of relief, or annoyance, show in his tone, but he was certain he failed on both points. “I got the names and contact info as well as…”

  “Come take a look at what the SOCO showed me,” Ravyn said, remaining some distance away, the beam of his torch directed at the ground.

  Stark had noticed the team supervised by the Scenes of Crime Officer busy within and without the snug, gathering trace evidence, taking snaps of everything, but paid them no mind. He was far too busy interviewing witnesses and running Ravyn’s errands. Besides, he thought, it was unlikely they would turn up anything requiring immediate action.

  “Blood?” asked Stark, looking at the few small drops fixed in the glare of the torch.

  “With directionality,” Ravyn confirmed, pointing off toward a narrow street. “All photographed and plotted. Come on.”

  Come on, where? Stark thought, but said: “Where does it go, sir, and how far?”

  “SOCO trailed it some ways down Hob’s Land before he lost it,” Ravyn replied. He followed the drops into darkness and Stark followed him. “Since the bleeding was mostly internal, as I am sure Dr Penworthy will confirm with her postmortem, SOCO likely lost the trail where the blood finally started to seep out.”

  Stark glanced back. The Three Crowns was lost in the night. The path they now followed was very narrow. To the left was open space, while on the right was a curving rough-brick wall separating the rear yards of cottages on the adjacent street.

  “This is a lane?” Stark queried. “Not really much more than a footpath, is it?”

  “Other places it might not even be that,” Ravyn admitted with a small chuckle. “But in Ashford it’s a lane, and a named one at that. One of the oldest streets in the village.”

  “Hob’s Lane, you said?”

  “Yeah, old name for the Devil.”

  “Some poor bloke sold his soul here, did he, sir?”

  Ravyn spared his sergeant a brief glance, examining his face in the dim light reflected up from the stone-paved path. It had not quite been three weeks since Stark was assigned to him, replacing Nevins who was promoting to a DI vacancy at Brighton. He had yet to make up his mind about Stark, and probably would not come to any conclusion for another three months, if the young man lasted that long. Stark was young for the position, but had more experience than any two detective sergeants in the Stafford CID put together, a benefit of coming out of the Metropolitan Police. At some point, a Scotland Yard administrative officer thought well enough of Stark to fast-track him into a DS position, but someone equally high in the Met saw fit, for reasons unknown, to send him out of the Smoke and into the wilds of Hammershire.

  What merited banishment, be it temporary or permanent, was anyone’s guess. Ravyn had read his personnel file, which came in the fullness of time, but like most official files tended more to obfuscate rather than reveal. Buried in there somewhere among the code words, euphemisms and outright lies was the truth. Stark knew the reason, of course, but whether he had the will to face it, much less share it, was another thing altogether, something that would come in its own time, or not at all.

  “Actually the Reverend Samuel Meriwether claims to have met Old Nick somewhere along this lane while on his way to administer last rites to a parishioner, one Mary Goodespeak, who was ready to breathe her last at the age of one-hundred three,” Ravyn explained. “Seems Mr Scratch had tried all her life to get Mistress Goodespeak to curse against God by visiting upon her one calamity after another, but despite his best efforts she outshone the faith of Job.”

  “So, he wanted the minister to…what?” Stark asked. “Tell her she wasn’t taking the lift up?”

  “Something like that,” Ravyn said, ignoring the insertion of an anachronism into an old village tale. “The Devil offered him riches, power, the usual sort of thing, but the Reverend was an upright and God-fearing man, wise in the deceit of evil. He dickered fiercely with the Devil over the price, for, as everyone knows, Satan can’t resist bargaining.”

  “Yes, sir, I have heard that,” Stark said laconically.

  “As they offered and counter-offered back and forth,” Ravyn continued, “the Devil became preoccupied. The good Reverend was able to uncork his vial of holy water and splash it over the fiend. He shouted, ‘Get thee hence from this village, Father of Lies,’ or words to that effect, and…poof…the Devil was banished with in a cloud of smoke and lightning. He rushed to the side of his dying parishioner and, with the few remaining drops of holy water, administered last rites, ensuring her entry into Heaven.”

  “Very vivid, sir,” Stark remarked. He sniffed the air. “One can almost smell the sulphur and brimstone. When did this happen?”

  “In the Year of Our Lord 1203,” Ravyn replied.

  “Just yesterday,” Stark said. “I’m sure they still talk about it.”

  “In a village like Ashford, the past is never very far away, even among those who pride themselves on being ‘moderns’,” Ravyn noted. “Keep that in mind, Stark. In being an obvious outsider, you have a disadvantage in dealing with most Hammershire folk. While there is little you can do about your native tongue and the nature to which you were raised, you gain nothing by erecting further barriers between you and them. You need not pander to their beliefs, but mockery, subtle or overt, is unproductive.”

  “Yes, I will keep that in mind, sir,” Stark acknowledged. “I like to think I can get along with anyone, even country folk.”

  “These ‘country folk’ are not only the people whom we serve,” Ravyn reminded him, “but they are the people upon whom we depend. Without information, we are blind and deaf.”

  “Yes, sir, as you say,” Stark said. “I’ll try to do better.”

  Stark was puzzled by the story. No doubt it was an often-told legend hereabouts, but he wondered if Ravyn’s telling it to him held some measure of chastisement. He was still trying to figure out the DCI, trying
to understand what made him tick.

  Ravyn seemed to Stark just another by-the-book stick-in-the-mud plodder, but there were times when an idealist shone through. Twice in the past three weeks he had seen Ravyn stand firm against the Superintendent, each time on behalf of some yob Ravyn felt had been hauled in unjustly. The thing was, Stark reflected, in each instance Ravyn had ultimately been proved correct.

  He had asked around, quietly of course, because he had no grasp yet of the politics of the Stafford CID. He did not yet know whom he could trust, whom he could not. He had not yet learned who was the soul of discretion, who was a grass. What he got from his discreet enquiries was a mass of conflicting opinion through which he was still sorting his way. Ravyn was either the greatest detective since Sherlock Holmes, or he was an utter ponce who kept his job only by remaining in the good graces of the Chief Constable. There were only two things everyone agreed upon. One was that anyone partnered with Ravyn either went on to much better things, or out of the service entirely. The other was that no one wanted to be partnered with Ravyn.

  Stark knew one thing by his own observation: Ravyn knew this county, its history and its inhabitants better than he could ever hope to. Of course, he reminded himself, he would never need to; after all, it was not like he was going to be here forever, was it?

  He followed as Ravyn moved slowly from one blood drop to another, deeper into darkness. The story continued to haunt him.

  “So, it’s been Hob’s lane since that day?”

  “Oh no, that’s a recent development,” Ravyn replied, grinning. “Until just prior to the Great War, it was bad luck to call it anything, except, maybe, ‘that damned track’ by some drunk who slipped in a rut. During a fit of modernization, some well-meaning do-gooders in Stafford had the rutted path paved with rock, then tried to name it Primrose Walk. Entrenched traditionalists prevailed in the end.”

  “Much like the present kerfuffle, is it, sir?” Stark suggested.

  Ravyn nodded. “I dare say you’re right, Stark. The past and the present are always at odds here.”

  “But progress always wins out,” Stark commented. “I mean, the houses will be built and the Tesco and such will be put in. What can anyone really do about progress? Even the folks here got a paved lane they didn’t want.”