‘I don’t like you to call me Mrs Armstrong. I’m Mary Jane.’
‘Very well.’ If she expected me to tell her to call me Kate, she could think again. ‘Let me take some particulars, Mary Jane.’
At the top of the page, I wrote.
Mary Jane Armstrong – Monday, 14 May, 1923: 4.30 a.m.
Missing: Ethan Armstrong, husband.
‘And your address?’
‘Mason’s Cottage on Nether End in Great Applewick.’
‘Tell me when you last saw Ethan.’
‘He went to work on Saturday, as usual. Ethan’s a stone mason. Works at Ledger’s quarry. Finishing time is one o’clock but he stayed on alone to get on with a special job. He’s all for better working hours for quarrymen, and yet he’s the one chooses to stay on when everyone else has knocked off.’
‘So he went to work on Saturday morning at about …’
‘They start at eight on Saturday, seven during the week. The children took him a bite to eat at five o’clock in the evening. I would have let him go hungry, till his belly brought him home.’ She closed her eyes and for a moment her breathing came in short bursts. Her chest rose and fell. She took very deliberate deep breaths, and then paused, as though she would take a running jump at what she needed to say. I waited for her to continue.
‘Harriet – she’s my daughter – she says he was out cold, lying in his hut. He didn’t stir when she touched him. She felt sure he was dead. Instead of coming straight home to me, she took it into her head to go to the farm, it being nearest, but having her little brother slowed her down. One of the men went back with her.’ Her eyes widened and she jutted her chin, as though expecting contradiction of what she would say next. ‘There was no sign of Ethan. The quarry was deserted. Arthur walked her to the road and sent her home. Then he went back to the farm for Austin, carried the little feller home on his shoulders.’
‘What age are the children?’ I wondered whether Austin would corroborate Harriet’s story.
‘Harriet’s ten, Austin is six.’
‘Did Austin see his father?’
She shook her head. ‘Harriet said she kept him back, kept him out of it.’ Mary Jane placed her hands on the table as though they no longer belonged to her. ‘I hurried down to the quarry as soon as Harriet told me. Ethan was nowhere to be found. We haven’t seen him since. I’m running mad with worry.’
‘Could Harriet have been mistaken?’
‘That’s what I hope and pray. But I believe her. She’s a truthful child and nobody’s fool. Sergeant Sharp, he’s our village bobby, he didn’t believe her. Made that quite plain. Said a dead man doesn’t stand up and walk. But give the sergeant his due, he pressed half a dozen quarrymen from the Fleece to search the quarry with lanterns, because by then it had come in dark. They were glad to do it, or some were. Ethan’s a man people love or loathe.’
At least she spoke of him in the present tense. Perhaps he wasn’t at the bottom of the well, unless dumped there by one of the people who loathed him.
‘Do you have a photograph?’
She took an envelope from her skirt pocket. It contained a photograph which she slid across the table. Ethan Armstrong gazed at me: broad faced, clean shaven, and with a solemn expression. He was wearing uniform and an infantry cap badge.
‘That was taken in 1917, so it’s six years old but the best I’ve got.’
‘What height and build is he?’
‘He’s five foot nine inches, with sandy coloured hair, well built, a strong fellow. He has to be in his line of work.’
‘His age?’
‘He’s thirty-six, same as me.’
‘Still clean shaven?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you leave things with Sergeant Sharp, after the search of the quarry?’
I wondered whether he may have circulated a description to the local hospitals.
‘He was fed up with me, especially when I told him we’d had a bit of a fall out that morning. He thinks Ethan has taken the hump and left me, and that Harriet is a little liar who seeks attention.’ Her voice rose, as if she half expected me to take the side of the police sergeant and dismiss her fears. ‘I haven’t slept. I can’t just leave it like this.’
I would have to tread a fine line. Either Ethan Armstrong had been murdered, or had abandoned his wife. ‘Who are his friends? Is there anyone he would have confided in, or gone to visit?’
After ten minutes I had established who loved Ethan: his good friend Bob Conroy whose farm Harriet hurried to; Ethan’s former apprentice, Raymond, now a mason in his own right; fellow trade unionists in the Quarrymen’s Union, and radicals across the North of England who agitated for better pay and conditions for working men. That didn’t exactly narrow the field.
Those who loathed him included the quarry foreman, who had defeated Ethan in his bid to call a strike last week.
‘Mary Jane, you say you believe Harriet when she describes finding her father’s body, even if the sergeant doesn’t?’
Her sigh came from somewhere deep. ‘I do, or I did. But now I begin to think she must have been mistaken. None of the quarrymen gave her credence. I began to think she must have seen some apparition.’ Her voice lifted with hope. ‘Bob thinks so too.’
‘Bob Conroy the farmer?’
‘Yes.’
Yet Bob Conroy had not been there to walk back with Harriet and search the quarry. I made a mental note that I must find out where he was on Saturday afternoon. This “good friend” might well be the Brutus who dealt the blow.
‘Was there any further search yesterday? Did you contact anyone?’
She shook her head. ‘Not a proper search, no. Bob said Ethan would be sure to turn up. He said that some comrades were meeting on Hawksworth Moor, a sort of labour rally.’ The red spots returned to her cheeks as she coloured up with anger. ‘I tell Ethan, we’d be better off if he put his energy into home and hearth. Bob took a stroll out to the moor, but he said he wasn’t made welcome without Ethan, and no one knew where Ethan was.’
‘Has Ethan disappeared before, without explanation?’
‘Never.’
‘How did Bob explain the fact that Harriet saw her father and thought him dead?’
‘He said that she would have been scared in the quarry. Last year, someone fell to his death there. Perhaps she saw shadows, or imagined something. The children tell stories about the quarry. They think goblins live in little caves in the slopes. Bob said.’
My mind worked overtime. ‘How long would it have taken Harriet to go to the farm, seek help, and get back to the quarry?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m not sure. Arthur made her wait till he’d finished the evening milking.’
‘An hour?’
‘It could have been an hour, or a little less. It was half past six by the time I went to the quarry to see for myself, and here’s the queerest thing …’
‘Go on.’
She took a sip of water. Her hands began to shake. ‘Ethan was making a sundial of blue slate, a very special job. Harriet and Austin both told me that when they arrived with the bite to eat for their dad, the sundial was standing there proud as you like, looking as finished as it might ever be. But by the time I arrived, after Harriet had told me her tale, it was going on dark. The sundial was smashed to smithereens, and there wasn’t hair nor hide of Ethan.’
She put her head in her hands, and just for a moment I thought myself in one of the melodramas that mother and I sometimes go to see at the Drury Lane Theatre in Wakefield.
She looked up. ‘What am I supposed to think? Harriet’s not a little liar, but there was no sign of him.’
‘Does Ethan drink?’
She gave a rueful smile. ‘No one could work in a quarry with all that dust and not drink. But he wouldn’t booze himself into a stupor at his work.’
‘Might there be any other explanation for what Harriet saw?’
She rested her forearms on the table and leaned forward.
‘I’ve been over and over that myself. Harriet’s a daddy’s girl. She’d heard us rowing. If Ethan said for her to tell me that he was laid out cold … But no, she wouldn’t have kept it up.’
‘What did you row about?’
She shook her head. ‘Summat and nowt. I wanted him to do summat in the house, and chop a few logs, and not be working on Mrs Ledger’s sundial for her birthday when he should be with us. And I feel so terrible now that we parted on bad terms but if he’s taken that as an excuse to bugger off, I’ll brain him.’
It vexed me that she seemed to be holding something back. And I am not so well known that my address is as familiar as 221B Baker Street.
‘Mary Jane, if you want my help, you must be candid. You haven’t even said how you found me.’
‘Someone gave me your address.’
‘Who?’
‘Does it matter?’
It would matter very much if she would not tell me. After ten long seconds, she said, ‘A relative of mine. She knew about you.’ As if to forestall any questions about this helpful relative, she continued, ‘It wasn’t such a terrible row with Ethan. He’d taken no food with him on Saturday because I wouldn’t put it up. Let his belly bring him home, that’s what I thought. Of course Harriet had to defy me …’
We were beginning to go round in circles. It was time to stop talking and act. I stood up. ‘You said the quarry opens for work at seven o’clock. It’s just turned five. Let’s go there now and you can show me where Harriet saw her father. I’d like to see it before men start work for the day.’ I did not add that any evidence there may have been would likely have been trampled underfoot by searching quarrymen and the local bobby. ‘Give me a few moments to get dressed.’
I left my visitor in the kitchen and tapped on the adjoining door that connects Mrs Sugden’s quarters.
My housekeeper took a few moments to answer. She had drawn on the warm maroon check dressing gown that had belonged to her late husband, fingers fumbling for its silky, fraying cord. Her long grey hair was braided in a single plait. Without spectacles, the plain face looked naked and vulnerable.
I apologised for disturbing her and quickly explained about my visitor.
‘And so I’m going to Great Applewick with Mrs Armstrong …’
‘At this hour?’
‘I want to get an early start, take a look at the quarry where her husband was last seen, before men start work. I don’t imagine they’ll take kindly to a posh nosey parker tramping about.’
‘I’m uneasy about this, Mrs Shackleton, on your own …’
I cut her off. ‘You’ll see the name and address on the kitchen table. Would you tell Mr Sykes where I’ve gone, and that I’ll call on him when I have more definite information?’
Sykes, an ex-policeman, is my assistant and lives a short distance away.
I left Mrs Sugden with her uneasiness.
Mary Jane appeared at the kitchen door. ‘I need the lavatory.’
‘I’ll show you. It’s upstairs.’
My portmanteaux still stood in the hall. Mary Jane glanced at the suitcases. ‘Are these to go up?’
‘Yes but they’re heavy,’ I said lamely.
She picked up one in each hand. ‘Not as heavy as kids and sacks of spuds.’ She marched ahead of me up the stairs. ‘Where shall I dump ’em?’
‘In my bedroom – there. Thank you.’
She carried the cases into my room, and then came back onto the landing. I turned to her. In the dim light, with her high cheekbones and slanting eyes she had the look of a cautious cat.
I switched on the bathroom light.
She sighed. ‘I wish we had a bathroom.’
When I did not answer, she said accusingly, ‘I’m not unused to them you know. I wouldn’t store coal in the bathtub.’
As I dressed, it occurred to me that anyone who could carry two full portmanteaux up the stairs would be able to drag the body of an errant husband to some hiding place in a quarry.
What did a person wear to go tramping round a quarry? Corduroy breeches, cap and boots. It would be a men only preserve. All the more important to get a move on and arrive before the males of the species started work. At least the rain had stopped. I dressed quickly, in a smartly cut tweed costume. Country clothes, suitable for a shooting party. My stout shoes, bought last year in Harrogate, would come in handy. A spare pair of Cuban heels and an extra pair of stockings would not go amiss.
Mary Jane Armstrong waited for me in the hall. I handed her Gerald’s motoring coat. ‘You’ll need this. There are goggles in the car.’
The coat reached her ankles. There it was again as I looked at her, the niggle about where we had met before.
‘Mary Jane, before we go, there’s just one thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘Where do we know each other from?’
She tried to turn up the coat cuff.
‘I can’t say.’
‘I’m not budging till you do.’
She looked at me, and then glanced away. ‘It’s a long time since I saw you, Catherine. You were a few weeks old. I was toddling about. A man came to take you away, and I cried. I didn’t want him to take you.’
She looked steadily at me, her feline eyes daring me to contradict. ‘My maiden name was Whitaker, same as yours before you were given the name of the people who adopted you. Catherine, I’m your sister.’
My heart thumped so hard I felt she would hear it. Little wonder she had been reluctant to say how she “knew” me. I was a few weeks old when I was adopted, and I knew the name of my natural family, and that they lived in Wakefield. Beyond those simple facts lay a mystery that I had so far felt no inclination to unravel.
We stood a few feet apart in the hallway. Mary Jane Armstrong may or may not be genuine; she may or may not be a murderess.
I felt suddenly unsteady on my feet. I reached out and touched the wall, to anchor myself. Mary Jane looked at me with a mixture of concern, and something else. Fear? That I would turn her away?
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.’
But she had come. And here we stood with our coats on, ready to go.
‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘Our sister, Barbara May. She always followed your progress.’
Progress. The word conjured up school history: kings and queens making epic journeys, lodging with favoured nobles; eating their subjects out of house, home and peace of mind.
And “Barbara May”. Did everyone in the Whitaker family have two names? Was that the reason for my being turfed out of the clan? We can’t have a girl with just the one name. Get shut of her. That nice police officer and his wife will take her off our hands. Mr Dennis Hood and his charming and childless wife, Virginia, affectionately known to her friends as Ginny. She’s a soft touch.
Mary Jane was not even claiming to be the one who followed my progress. I had Barbara May to thank for that. Perhaps Barbara May would turn up next. Find my lost dog, love. Give me the loan of a shilling.
Mary Jane may be telling the truth, or she could be a glorious confidence trickster whose story I had swallowed without chewing. That would explain the lump in my craw.
‘How did Barbara May find out where I live?’
‘It was in the Mercury, when you married. Barbara May worked as a cleaner at the infirmary, where your husband used to work.’
I could not be sure, but thought she looked a little embarrassed. She did not explain whether Barbara May followed Gerald home, or poked about in the infirmary files for his address.
She added, ‘Mam was very pleased when you married a doctor.’
Shut up, Mary Jane. Don’t say any more.
In the thick silence, neither of us looked at each other as I hitched my satchel onto my shoulder, and reached out to open the door. The key did not want to budge, nor the knob to turn. Don’t let her see how shaken I am. Don’t let her see that I need two hands: the right hand to turn the handle, and the left hand to stop the right
hand shaking.
‘Right, Mary Jane. Let’s go.’
I would think about this sister business later. For now, I must put it out of my mind and concentrate on the business in hand. She had come to me for help.
Two
As we walked up the road, my legs felt leaden and yet there was a strange lightness, as if I no longer belonged to myself and might float away.
We walked up the quiet street to the old stable my neighbours let me use as a garage for the Jowett. Silver cobwebs decorated the hedgerows.
There was lightness in Mary Jane’s step as the motoring coat slapped her ankles, and an air of blitheness about her, as though she had shuffled off all her worries and everything would be all right, now that she had found me. Even through the fog of trying to make sense of her words, I recognised her mood. It was familiar to me from when I helped women after the war. The relief of having someone on one’s side creates the illusion that all will be well. Now was not the moment to burst the bubble.
Sister. She was my sister. This little girl, Harriet, who had found her father’s body, was my niece. And there was a nephew. What was his name? Austin. Little Austin, she had called him.
The horror of what those children had discovered hit me somewhere else, deep inside.
‘Where are the children now?’ I asked.
‘I left them sleeping. I put a note on the table in case they wake before I get back.’
Early in the morning, everything makes more noise. The door of the old stable where I garage the Jowett creaked loudly as I opened it. Mary Jane gazed at the car. ‘What a beautiful motor! The kids’ll want a ride in this.’
She was acting as if we were about to have a day out, instead of beginning what might be a murder investigation.
‘Shut the door when I drive out would you?’
She stepped well aside as though expecting to have her toes crushed by the car wheels.
When she had closed the doors, she clambered in.
I handed her the map. ‘You’ll have to tuck your hands up your sleeves to keep warm. I forgot to bring extra gloves.’
Murder in the Afternoon: A Kate Shackleton Mystery Page 2