by Ann Granger
‘I do indeed,’ Markby told her. ‘There are a lot of people like that.’
‘He spent too much time with his head in books, that’s what,’ concluded Muriel.
‘You know,’ Markby said to her, ‘I think I may have met you twenty-two years ago when I came to this house to talk to Mr Pattinson. A woman showed me into the study but to my shame, I can’t remember if it was you.’
‘It would’ve been me but I don’t remember you, either. I remember a copper coming to call about the rapes in the woods, but not his face.’
Markby said ruefully, ‘My memory ought to have been jogged when you opened the door to Meredith and me and remarked we might have thought you the housekeeper. Not now you’re not. But you were then. I should have remembered.’
There was a silence. Then Muriel added soberly, ‘So it was Old Billy Twelvetrees, after all. It makes sense when you think about it, but when I remember him tottering up the village street with his stick – well, it’s hard to adjust to it.’
‘He wasn’t old then. He was fit, strong and sexually, he was frustrated. His wife was an invalid and marital relations had ceased. But he was also disposed to domestic violence. He saw no reason why he shouldn’t take what he wanted elsewhere. He worked right alongside the woods. Yes, it does all make sense.’
‘Living here all those years among us,’ Muriel shook her head. ‘Knowing what he’d done. I wonder he had the nerve. He couldn’t have had any conscience.’
‘I don’t suppose he did. He was a nasty piece of work. Nor was he afraid his daughter, who alone knew what he’d been up to, would tell. She was cowed by his authority and frightened of losing her home. Besides, if he’d left, where else would he have gone? This was his village, his was a local family. All his life had been spent here. He worked at the farm and had no other skills. He lived in a tied cottage. He’d lose all that. What’s more, if he’d ever considered running away, he must have realised it would arouse suspicion in itself. That a man with his roots so firmly in Lower Stovey would suddenly pack his bags and go, that would have had tongues wagging. He kept his head. There were no suspicions of him. He stayed. In fact, he became pathologically afraid of leaving.’
Muriel nodded. ‘He cheated us all at the end, too, didn’t he?’
‘Us?’ Markby enquired gently.
She grimaced. ‘I do have a personal interest. I wasn’t one of his victims, don’t go thinking that! But I had other relations here besides Uncle Martin when I came. You investigated the Potato Man business. You’ll remember Mavis Cotter.’
‘I do. She was the first, or the first we knew of.’
‘Poor kid. She was a sort of cousin of mine, too. In villages like this one, we’re all pretty well related. Only I’m not kin to the Twelvetrees, thank God! Tainted bloodline that, if you ask me.’ She looked up at him. ‘They put Mavis away, you know, after that affair in the woods.’
‘Put her away?’ Markby was startled.
‘Yes, in an institution. Her mother reckoned she couldn’t be responsible for her, not after what had happened. She said Mavis might go roaming off and something else happen to her. Mavis had no sense. Bit simple. But she was a nice girl, pleasant, hard-worker, biddable. Never any trouble. She had a very loving nature. But she couldn’t look after herself. So, in the end, away she went. It was wrong, wasn’t it, to do that to her?’ Muriel’s sharp gaze rested on Markby’s face.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was wrong.’
‘She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t a danger. She was just a bit backward and her mother couldn’t cope with it. So away she went, locked up with a lot of strangers, looked after by strangers. She would have had no idea why. They did that in those days. It was as if they punished the victim.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Not your fault,’ she replied. ‘That’s life, isn’t it? Something goes wrong and then things keep on going wrong. It can happen to anyone.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘It’d been nice if the police could’ve nabbed him back then. But at least we know what happened and people here know that poor Mavis didn’t make it all up.’
‘I’m glad,’ Markby told her, ‘you see it that way. It is, I suppose, some small consolation even for me.’
From outside came a dismal howl.
‘I’ll have to let him in,’ said Muriel.
‘I have to go. I have to pick up Meredith at the church and then we mean to look in on Ruth before we leave.’
Muriel scowled alarmingly not, as it turned out, in wrath but at the working of memory. ‘Ruth, glad you reminded me. Tell her, will you, that I’ve got some papers of her father’s for her. I’ve been turning out. Got to, now the place is up for sale.’ She gestured vaguely towards the study. ‘I should have put everything of his together when he died and handed it all to his daughter then. But Ruth wasn’t living here then, so I pretty well left everything where it was. Later Ruth did move back here with Gerald, her husband. He was a nice bloke,’ Muriel added in parenthesis. ‘Pity he didn’t last long. Cancer, you know. Anyway, I remember I told Ruth I had some stuff here if she wanted it and she said something about coming over and going through it all. But she never did, what with Gerald being ill and so on.’
‘I’ll tell her. What sort of papers are they?’
A sniff greeted this. ‘What he used to call his research. He was very keen on ancient legends and that sort of thing. He had a bee in his bonnet about the Green Man. Hang on.’ Muriel got up and lumbered out of the room. After a moment she returned and handed Markby a battered cardboard folder. ‘This is a typical example. Give it to Ruth, will you, so she can see the sort of thing it is. Tell her there are another three boxes full of it.’
There was another amiable battle with Roger on the way out. Markby got into his car and put the folder on the front passenger seat. He reached out with the ignition key, but then curiosity overcame him. He flipped open the folder and pulled out the top sheet. It was hand-written in a cramped, old-fashioned style.
‘Yesterday my wife persuaded me to go with her to a garden centre. I was surprised to find there (among all the other very expensive ornaments for gardens) a plastic mask of the Green Man. Or that’s what it claimed to be. It should have been labelled as foliate head, because its expression was far too benign for the old Green Man! It looked quite jolly. Where were the sly features or the tormented ones? Where the eyes filled with ancient wickedness and the knowledge of unspoken, dreadful sin?’
Markby pushed the sheet back into the folder. The late Reverend Pattinson had been misled. Because features were benign, it didn’t mean some awful memory didn’t lurk behind them. Only consider Old Billy Twelvetrees, a mischievous old fellow, a local eccentric, but no harm in him to all outward appearances. But unspoken sin? Oh, yes!
Meredith had left Alan to tell Muriel Scott they didn’t want the house. She hadn’t wanted to rehearse the episode in the woods again. She was grateful to Muriel and grateful to Roger but it wasn’t something she wanted to relive.
She pushed open the church door and stepped into St Barnabas’s cool dim interior for the last time. She saw at once she wasn’t alone. A young man was studying the Sir Rufus Fitzroy monument, a tourist, she supposed. He turned his head and smiled at her.
‘Imposing old fellow, isn’t he?’
She felt impelled to carry on Ruth’s tradition of welcoming visitors. Meredith walked over to stand beside him and looked up at Sir Rufus. ‘He looks a tough old chap to me, too,’ she agreed.
‘They were tough days. Survival of the fittest. Just to stay alive you had to be incredibly strong. Disease, poor sanitation, half the food you ate already on the turn, operations without anaesthetic or disinfectants …’ He gave another, slightly deprecating smile. ‘I’m a doctor,’ he said. ‘I think about these things.’
‘You’re not Guy Morgan, are you?’ Meredith asked. ‘Who found the bones?’
He looked astonished. ‘Yes. You are—?’
‘Meredith Mitchell. I was visiting
Lower Stovey that day with Alan Markby, Superintendent Markby.’
‘Oh, right. Yes, he was there when the other coppers and I came out of the woods with the bones. I’m glad they were able to put a name to them.’
‘I should have liked to attend the inquest, but I had to be at work that day.’
At the mention of the inquest, Guy frowned. ‘The dead chap’s mother was there. I wanted to go and speak to her, condolences and all that, but she wouldn’t look at me. She avoided my eye in a very definite way, so I left it. I guessed my finding her son’s remains was something she found difficult, a real stopper to any conversation.’
‘Alan told me Mrs Hastings was very – well, not happy, that’s not the word – that she was satisfied that her son’s remains were found. It was a great consolation to her so I’m sure in a way she was glad you did find him. To lose a child must be terrible, no matter how old he is at the time.’
‘I suppose so.’ Guy turned his head away and looked up at Sir Rufus. ‘My mother gave me away, but I dare say she had her reasons.’
‘Gave you away?’
‘Yes, put me up for adoption. I expect I was illegitimate. Looking round this church and seeing all these people belonging to one family is odd to me. I don’t have any blood relations and I can’t imagine what it’s like. I’ve got my adoptive parents and they are my parents as far as I’m concerned. They’ve been loving and supportive and understanding. No blood parent could have been better. They’d been unable to have children and so saw me as a wonderful gift. I realised, even when I was very young, that I was very special to them.’
Meredith asked, ‘So you’ve never tried to trace your birth mother?’
He shook his head. ‘No. What would be the point? What would we say to one another? She’s made her life without me and I’ve made my life without her. Let sleeping dogs lie. Or, as an elderly patient once said to me, “It’s best not to go stirring up the water, there’s sometimes nasty things lying in the mud at the bottom of a pond.’” He turned to go. ‘Well, I’ll be on my way. I wanted to come and look at this place, what with it being in the news after I found the bones in the woods. Give my regards to the superintendent. Nice to meet you.’ He shook her hand briefly. ‘Cheerio.’
She watched him walk out, his stocky figure briefly silhouetted against the sunlight in the open door before it fell shut behind him, leaving her alone with Sir Rufus, Hubert and Agnes, and whatever ghosts inhabited this old church.
‘Well, now, Mr Pearce,’ said the dentist. ‘We haven’t seen you for a while.’
‘Um, no,’ said Pearce. ‘I’ve been busy.’
‘I read about it in the papers. The murder at Lower Stovey. Nasty affair. And that business of the bones someone found in the woods. It’s all go with you, isn’t it? Are the teeth giving you trouble?’
Pearce’s mind, for an instant, scrambled the question so that he almost replied that the teeth had been a clue to the jawbone’s owner. But of course, he was here for his own teeth, or particularly, one tooth.
‘I’ve been having a few twinges,’ he admitted.
‘Then let’s have a look. Open wide, please, wide as you can … Ah, yes …’
Map of Lower Stovey
Also by Ann Granger
Mitchell and Markby crime novels
Say It With Poison
A Season For Murder
Cold In The Earth
Murder Among Us
Where Old Bones Lie
A Fine Place For Death
Flowers For His Funeral
Candle For A Corpse
A Touch Of Mortality
A Word After Dying
Call The Dead Again
Beneath These Stones
Shades Of Murder
Fran Varady crime novels
Asking For Trouble
Keeping Bad Company
Running Scared
Risking It All
Ann Granger has lived in cities in many parts of the world, since for many years she worked in British embassies as far apart as Munich and Lusaka. She is married, with two sons, and she and her husband are now permanently based near Oxford.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 Ann Granger
The right of Ann Granger to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in 2002
by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING
First published in paperback in 2002
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eISBN 9781429974479
First eBook Edition : March 2011