Harm’s Way

by Catherine Aird

Have mercy upon us

  Police Constable Ted Mason might be one for the quiet life. That was not to say that he was not also a conscientious police officer. He was not an unclever one either. He unobtrusively absented himself from the search-party working its way over Lowercombe Farm and slipped back into the village. This time he did not choose the Lamb and Flag public house as his source of information. He made his way instead to Great Rooden’s village store and post office. If nothing else, as Superintendent Leeyes had remarked, he knew his patch.

  He began with an apology. “Sorry to be knocking you up on a Sunday afternoon, Mabel,” he said.

  “That’s all right, Ted,” was the calm reply. As the principal shopkeeper in Great Rooden Mrs. Mabel Milligan was an important figure in the social fabric of the village. Being disturbed out of shop hours was part of the price she paid for her importance. “What can I get you?”

  “Sugar,” responded Police Constable Mason promptly.

  Now Mrs. Mabel Milligan had personally served Mrs. Mason with two kilos of cane sugar and ten of preserving sugar for jam-making—strawberries being nearly ready for this—only the day before but she did not say so. “What sort of sugar?” she enquired instead, taking it that the Sunday Trading Act was not going to be mentioned by either party.

  “Ordinary sugar,” replied Mason, momentarily flummoxed.

  Mrs. Milligan led the way through into the darkened store and picked out a bag of cane sugar for him. “Can’t have you running out, can we?” she observed drily.

  “No.” Ted Mason handed over the money for the sugar, remarking with apparent inconsequence, “I’ve been at Pencombe all day; otherwise I would have come earlier.”

  “They’re having a bit of trouble over there, I hear,” rejoined Mrs. Milligan.

  The constable nodded. “There’s probably a dead man about somewhere.” He did not immediately expand on this. He knew that Mrs. Milligan’s intelligence-gathering network was at least as good as his own and there was no point in telling her anything that she already knew.

  “From all accounts,” said Mrs. Milligan circumspectly, “he’s been there a tidy old time too.”

  “’Bout a month,” volunteered Mason. There was no secret about that.

  “Dear, dear,” clucked Mrs. Milligan, “that’s bad.”

  “Doesn’t make detecting any easier,” agreed the grower of prize cabbages.

  “It can’t do, Ted,” responded Mrs. Milligan warmly. “A month. Fancy that.”

  “Lost any customers lately, Mable?” The policeman was quite serious now.

  She frowned. “Charlie Gibbs—he died, didn’t he? About the beginning of June, that would have been.”

  “I saw him buried myself,” said Ted Mason, “seeing as how he used to grow marrows.”

  “They had a ham,” remarked Mrs. Milligan inconsequentially.

  The policeman nodded. The purchase of funeral baked meats came close to circumstantial evidence of burial.

  “There was old Miss Tebbs, too.”

  “Another ham?” enquired Mason without irony.

  Mable Milligan sniffed. “Her nephew didn’t even have a tea.”

  “Always was a mean man, was Albert Tebbs, and he hasn’t changed as he’s got older.”

  “People don’t,” said Mrs. Milligan sagely. “They just get more like they were before.”

  “Albert Tebbs will die rich,” forecast Mason.

  Mrs. Milligan’s mind was on something else. “You could say,” she murmured delicately, “that in a manner of speaking I’d lost another customer as well.”

  Police Constable Mason waited.

  “Mr. Ritchie.” She pursed her lips. “You know about Mr. Ritchie, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “We had heard.”

  “Not that Mrs. Ritchie has made any secret about it. ‘No more bacon, Mrs. Milligan,’ she said to me the first time she came in after he’d gone. ‘Nasty, fattening stuff.’” Mrs. Milligan looked down at her own ample figure and went on. “Myself, I must say I like a nice slice of best greenback to start the day.”

  “Me, too,” agreed the portly policeman absently. He reverted to Martin Ritchie. “Gone off with a girl, I hear.”

  “So Mrs. Ritchie said.” Mrs. Milligan tossed her head. “Can’t say I blame him for that. Nothing to come home to there in the way of home comforts.”

  “She doesn’t look a good cook,” ventured Mason with all the authority of a man long married to a very good cook indeed.

  Mabel Milligan, no mean trencherwoman herself, waved a pudgy hand. “She isn’t. She was always buying made-up dishes.”

  Ted Mason regarded her with respect. “You know all about us, don’t you, Mabel?”

  “A man is what he eats,” she said profoundly.

  “And you,” said the policeman neatly, “know what everyone in Great Rooden eats, don’t you?”

  She squinted modestly at the shop floor. “Can’t help it, can I? You see everything from behind the counter.”

  “And you don’t let on, do you?” he said. Mrs. Milligan had a great reputation in Great Rooden for keeping her own counsel.

  “I never was one to talk, Ted Mason,” she retorted briskly, “and well you know it.”

  “So that’s three customers you’ve lost in June,” he said, changing his tack a little.

  “Some you gain, some you lose,” she said cryptically. “There’s swings and roundabouts in everything.”

  “No one else missing, anyway?” said the policeman.

  “Nobody buying for one that used to buy for two, if that’s what you mean,” she countered precisely.

  “Except Mrs. Ritchie?”

  “Buy!” echoed Mrs. Milligan richly. “That woman doesn’t buy. She only picks about. She’s that keen on her precious figure that she doesn’t buy proper food at all.”

  “We’re looking for Martin Ritchie anyway, just to check up.” Mason transferred the bag of sugar to his other hand. “Talking of checking up …”

  “Yes?” It was the tribute of one well-informed villager to another and she knew it.

  “I hear that Len Hodge had a bit of an up-and-downer in the Lamb and Flag last month.”

  “Did he?” Mabel Milligan’s face was expressionless.

  “It’s not like him,” observed Mason.

  “No,” she agreed with this. “He’s not a fighter, isn’t Len.”

  “I just wondered …” began Mason.

  “Yes?”

  “If you had heard who it was that he was fighting with.”

  “Me?” she said blandly. “Why ask me? Why don’t you ask Vic Higgins? He’s the landlord.”

  “Because he’s new, that’s why.”

  She shifted her ground. “Now, how should I know what goes on at the Lamb and Flag?”

  “Because, Mabel,” replied Mason cogently, “you hear everything that goes on in Great Rooden, that’s why.”

  “So do you, Ted Mason.”

  “No, I don’t,” he said simply. “I’m a policeman, remember. I only hear what people want me to hear.” He transferred the bag of sugar back to his other hand. “There’s some things that get kept from me.”

  “Are there now?” she said tonelessly.

  “If people think it’s better that I don’t know about something then they don’t tell me.”

  “Well, then—”

  “Which is not the same thing at all,” persisted the policeman, standing the bag of sugar on the counter, “as telling me and trusting that I’ll do the right thing.”

  She nodded. “I can see that.”

  “So,” he said judiciously, “if you should happen—just happen, mind you—to hear who it was that Len Hodge was fighting with in the Lamb and Flag that night I’d be greatly obliged if you’d let me know.”

  Mrs. Milligan remained impassive. “I’ll remember that, Ted.”

  “Because if it’s anything to do with this dead man that’s around somewhere we’re going to find out sooner or later anyway.”
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br />   “Course you are,” she agreed.

  “And then,” insisted the policeman heavily, “it’ll be a lot easier for everybody concerned if it’s been sooner rather than later.”

  Mrs. Milligan let him get as far as the shop door before she spoke. “You’ve forgotten the sugar, Ted,” she said. “That was what you came for, wasn’t it?”

  Detective Inspector Sloan let the crowd of walkers and policeman fan out over Lowercombe Farm without him. He had gone with them a little way—just until he was out of sight of the farmhouse and Mr. and Mrs. Bailey, who were standing together at the front door. Side by side the old couple looked like Darby and Joan but Sloan kept an open mind about this. Oedipus and several schools of articulate European psychologists had had a lot to say about the lasting outcome of parent-and-child relationships. They were much less eloquent in their pronouncements on the long-term effects of those between husband and wife.

  Perhaps it wasn’t so important after all but before now Sloan had noticed that the ways of the partner opposite the forceful one of the pair often ran very deep indeed. A lifetime spent outwardly agreeing with Sam Bailey would surely have made its mark on any woman. He knew from his own experience in the force that instant obedience was no criterion of genuine compliance—nor of anything but token subservience to an authority that it would be imprudent to challenge. Sam Bailey, crossed, would obviously be a very awkward customer indeed.

  Once all the others had turned the corner from the farmhouse Sloan hung back and soon the rest of the search-party were way ahead of him. That was when he turned in his tracks and made steadily for Dresham Wood. It lay behind the farmhouse, sheltering it from the hill behind and coming between the road and the farm proper. Lowercombe, being at the bottom of the valley, was in by far the most favoured position of all the farms. The river Westerbrook flowed through this land, too. It was a little fuller down here than it was higher up the hill and Sloan could see the blue forget-me-nots growing in the banks and a flower that might have been purple loosestrife not far from the water’s edge.

  He soon picked up the track into the wood that was obviously Footpath Seventy-nine. There was no mistaking it—the Berebury Country Footpaths Society would have had little problem in identifying their trail where it led into the wood. The way through the trees was well defined, too, although here and there young branches had grown across the route, and the odd bramble had sent out a new spur which lay in wait for the unwary. It didn’t catch Sloan because he had his eyes down anyway. Leaf-mould there was in plenty under the canopy of the trees but it lay to the sides of the path.

  He did cast his eyes upwards a couple of times to see what manner of wood Dresham was. In the main it was oak and ash trees which met his gaze, though he caught sight of a thorn or two and a holly. As he advanced farther into the wood he came across a wild cherry and he thought he saw the greenish white of a guelder rose. There was a great deal of undergrowth, too. Too much. Far too much, in fact. Sam Bailey wasn’t tending his land as he should. Sloan saw several dead trees that should have been out of the wood and burnt a couple of years ago at least, and others that should have been felled in their prime for timber. Woods needed culling in the same way that herds of deer did.

  At one point quite soon after he had entered the wood the footpath crossed a tiny runnel of water finding its immemorial way down to the Westerbrook—too slight even to call for stepping-stones where the path crossed it. Everyone was obviously left to pick their own way over the dampness as best they could. They had done so by stepping to one side of the path or the other and selecting the best place to stride across. There the path showed footmarks in plenty. Detective Inspector Sloan regarded them with an automatic professional interest. Mrs. Elsie Bailey was short but not thin. Any footprint that she made in soft ground would be small but deep. One look at the multitude of footmarks in the damp ground disabused him of the hope that he would find any one print without a lot of trouble—and luck. He would have to seek another way of finding out what it was that Mrs. Bailey had gone into the wood for.

  And Len Hodge.

  Sloan penetrated farther but was no wiser. There was enough undergrowth to conceal almost anything from sight from the path. If there was a woodland grave hereabouts he, Sloan, wasn’t going to find it single-handed. If, though, a fox had found it first, then a finger might well have been dropped on open ground by Master Reynard, and then been found by a crow. That wouldn’t be so much an ecological coincidence as the sort of chain of circumstances greatly beloved by legal counsel for whomsoever they were acting. Chains of circumstance left plenty of room for manoeuvre in court.

  He carried on, his mind a confusion compounded of childhood recollections of the deceptively simple tale of the Babes in the Wood—if ever a case had called for a full-scale police investigation it was the nasty story of the Babes in the Wood—whatever had their parents been thinking of—and that sinister ballad “The Twa Corbies.” Although it had been about ravens rather than crows, there was a dreadful relevance about the birds asking each other where they would go and dine today.

  At one point Sloan stopped and stood still for a minute or two and listened. If his eyes could not supply him with any clues perhaps his ears could. But he was aware of nothing except the alarm call of a bird which had heard him approaching and was uttering a general warning.

  He pushed on again.

  The undergrowth was right up to the path now, and he could see almost nothing through it. It would need a great deal of time and men to search the wood properly. In “The Twa Corbies” the new-slain knight whose body had provided dinner for the ravens had been lying behind the old turfed bank.…

  And naebody kens that he lies there,

  But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

  Sloan would very much have liked to know if the same could be said of the owner of the finger that now reposed in Dr. Dabbe’s forensic laboratory. He would also have liked to know—and had every intention of finding out—what it was that had brought Len Hodge and Mrs. Elsie Bailey into Dresham Wood so urgently. He forged on without coming any nearer to knowing and after a while started to see the trees beginning to thin out ahead.

  Through the wood without being out of it yet, he thought to himself, turning and retracing his steps back to the farmyard at Lowercombe.

  The others didn’t find anything on Sam Bailey’s land even though they searched all over it until the end of the afternoon.

  Gordon Briggs, self-appointed spokesman of the Berebury Country Footpaths Society, reported failure to Sloan with melancholy satisfaction. “Nothing, Inspector. Not a sign of anything suspicious.”

  “Somewhere,” said Sloan determinedly, “within the radius that we have been searching is a skeleton.” A crow would not fly over a greater acreage than they had walked over that afternoon with something relatively heavy in its beak. The ornithologist had said so.

  “Very likely,” responded Gordon Briggs, “but my members haven’t found it yet and neither have your policemen.” He looked rather pointedly at his watch and coughed. “Mrs. Mellot kindly said she would give us tea.”

  Sloan bowed to a higher reality and when Detective Constable Crosby’s team, too, gave Lowercombe Farm a clean bill of health he consented to a general return across the road and back to Pencombe Farm. There was someone else making his way back there at the same time. Just as the walkers reached the farmyard they were overtaken by Len Hodge in his disreputable old car. As the farmworker clambered out one of the walkers said to him, “You timed that nicely, didn’t you, mate? Missing all the footslogging.…”

  Len Hodge grimaced. “Footslogging would have been easier.”

  “Oh?”

  Hodge shrugged his shoulders. “A character over at Sleden thought the best way of getting a bonfire going when there wasn’t any wind was to pour a can of paraffin over it.”

  “Oh, a fire.…”

  “He had a fire, all right,” rejoined Hodge briefly.

  “Not a fal
se alarm then,” said someone else.

  “Lost his eyebrows and his greenhouse,” said the part-time fireman succinctly.

  “All burns are carelessness,” pronounced Gordon Briggs with a sanctimoniousness that must have lost him a lot of friends.

  “What about the singeing of the beard of the King of Spain,” cut in a mischievous walker, one of the few who weren’t overawed by the schoolmaster.

  “That was politics,” said Briggs severely.

  Leonard Hodge shrugged his shoulders. “I wouldn’t know anything about the King of Spain but I reckon this old boy won’t touch paraffin again in a hurry.”

  The group straggled back through the farmyard towards the kitchen at Pencombe. Detective Inspector Sloan fell into step beside Len Hodge. “I’ve had a look in Dresham Wood, too,” he said to the farmworker.

  “Then you’ve been wasting your time,” said Hodge, apparently unperturbed. “Crows wouldn’t go into a wood for their pickings. Too dangerous for them.” He waved an arm. “They like open country same as this.”

  Sloan looked up. As if to prove Hodge’s point, there were several crows wheeling about overhead.

  “Always around the farmyard, they are,” said Hodge.

  Sloan nodded. That was only natural.

  “Plenty of pickings, you see,” said Hodge gruffly.

  “Of course,” agreed Sloan. In the old ballad the new-slain knight had lain out of sight behind an old turfed bank. All such likely places on four farms had now been examined without success. Sloan braced his shoulders. They would just have to go on and look at the unlikely places then. He looked round the farmyard. George Mellot had come out of the back door of the farmhouse and was standing on the doorstep watching him approach. The crows still wheeled overhead.…

  Sloan halted and said abruptly to Len Hodge, “Where do you keep your ladders?”

  “In the barn.”

  “Show me.”

  Instead of advancing towards George Mellot the policeman wheeled away from the direction of the back door, and turned into the barn. There was an assortment of ladders stacked against the wall. Sloan pointed to the longest and said to Hodge, “Give me a hand with that one, will you?”