Murder in the Afternoon: A Kate Shackleton Mystery

by Frances Brody

  ‘I’m glad you’re doing that, Mr Conroy. So you and Ethan are fellow revolutionaries?’

  He laughed gently. ‘Ethan’s a visionary, but he has no illusions. Those who fear we’re on the eve of a revolution overestimate us. There are too many powerful people who’ll fight tooth and nail to keep things as they are.’

  ‘Then Ethan must have enemies?’

  ‘We’re not important enough for that, though Ethan would think differently.’

  I looked again at the inscription on the reverse of the shepherd’s gravestone. ‘You said Ethan carved this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s …’

  ‘Go on.’ His head jutted, like a tortoise peeping from its shell. ‘Tell me what you think he meant by it.’

  When I did not answer straightaway, he sighed, as if reluctant to continue, as if the man in the grave may have ears that flapped. ‘Shall we sit down somewhere Mrs Shackleton?’

  We walked the path, beyond the older graves and the willow tree until we came to the seat I had vacated not so long before.

  ‘Will this do?’

  Conroy sat with his back to the tree, like some latter-day Green Man who might find his way into the trunk and never be seen again.

  ‘So tell me, Mr Conroy, why did Ethan carve those cryptic lines from scripture?’

  ‘Our farm is adjacent to Ledgers’ land. We have the freehold. Last spring, a child brought word to say that one of the lambs had lost its way and was by the quarry. It was a Sunday you see so there was no man at work to pick it up and bring it home. I don’t know exactly how it happened. But Simon went alone to save the lamb. Next thing I heard, he lay dead in the quarry bottom.’ He sighed. ‘I carried him home myself.’

  His large hands cradled his kneecaps, as though he were a boy who had fallen and grazed himself and was trying to make it better. He rocked slightly.

  I thought he had forgotten that he intended to explain the inscription, but after a long time, he said, ‘Those words that Ethan carved, “He who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber”, he meant Colonel Ledger.’

  ‘Colonel Ledger? Why?’

  ‘The colonel wanted to buy our farm. Ethan thought that Ledger was behind Simon’s death. Oh he didn’t say that to me. He didn’t have to. We each knew what the other was thinking right enough. Ethan believed that Ledger wanted Simon out of the way. Without him, he thought I’d sell. He made an offer while Simon was alive, and he made another, the week after Simon was buried.’

  ‘Why would Colonel Ledger want your farm?’

  ‘Because the existing quarry is near exhausted. The colonel sent his engineer across one day to our far meadow. Simon caught him taking samples. There’s a rich seam – a millstone grit that’s high quality. We’re near the railway line. He has the labour force here. As long as Simon was in this world, there’d be no question of selling up. With Simon gone, Ledger counted that I would give up the land. I almost did. Hadn’t the heart for going on. But Ethan encouraged me. He said to hold fast. What if I had a son, he said, and then I would be sorry to have lost the farm.’

  ‘But your brother’s death was an accident. He’d gone to find a lamb that had strayed.’

  ‘Yes. And that’s what I think. But Ethan has a mind to see beyond to other motives, and sometimes he’s right. We never found out what child brought the message.’

  ‘Did he think the colonel pushed Simon to his death?’

  ‘Not the colonel himself, but he could have made his wishes known. It wasn’t Ledger made us the offer directly, it was his man.’

  ‘But you didn’t sell then.’

  ‘Ethan persuaded me not to. He helped me whenever he could. But it was no use. We had a bad winter, sick animals, the price of feed has been more than I could stand. A week ago yesterday, I told Ethan that I’d accepted the colonel’s offer’

  We sat in silence. At a nearby grave an old woman set down a mat and knelt. She began, in an increasingly loud and complaining voice, to tell the occupant of the grave about the door coming off the kitchen cupboard.

  After his outpouring of emotion and suspicion regarding his brother’s death, Conroy placed his palms on the bench and seemed to be gathering his composure.

  I risked a question. ‘Mr Conroy, perhaps you can help with something that puzzles me.’

  ‘What is it?’

  I handed him the cutting.

  A well provided and pleasant lady seeks well provided amiable gentleman with a view to joining lives and fortunes.

  Box No. 49

  ‘Does this mean anything to you?’

  He scanned it, and then blushed. ‘I hope Mary Jane doesn’t think Ethan would chase after another woman.’

  ‘She didn’t know what to think.’

  Conroy shook his head. ‘He wouldn’t do that.’ He stood. ‘I have to get back to work.’

  We walked together through the churchyard. As we reached the lych gate, I tried once more. ‘Do you know why Mary Jane wouldn’t leave Great Applewick last year, when Ethan could have got work on the Minster?’

  He hesitated. ‘Don’t think ill of Mary Jane. You see, there’s more to it.’

  For a moment, he looked as if he regretted his words. ‘She … you see … well, they have two bairns buried in the chapel graveyard. Perhaps that’s what keeps Mary Jane tied to this place.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said simply.

  ‘I don’t think she likes to talk about it. Shall I show you?’

  We crossed the street to the rival place of worship and walked beyond the chapel to where the neat gravestones stood row on row. It was a small headstone. Two children, born after Harriet, had died within a month of each other, at ages three and two; one named after his father, and one named after me.

  ‘They caught the whooping cough,’ he said simply. ‘Mary Jane was beside herself with grief.’

  He left me standing there. Sometimes it seems the world is just one great big sphere of loss, spinning fast, trying to topple us all over the edge.

  Slowly, I walked back towards the cottage. It struck me that there was a great deal Mary Jane did not like to talk about.

  Eleven

  As I turned the bend, a few yards from the cottage, the children dawdled towards me along the lane. ‘Are you off somewhere?’

  Austin said, in a sulky voice, ‘I don’t want to go again.’

  Harriet sighed. ‘We have to apologise for taking Billy and making him search for Dad.’

  ‘Billy?’

  ‘The sheepdog.’

  ‘Did you cover much ground?’

  Harriet shook her head. ‘Billy didn’t want to do it. He ran off.’

  ‘Didn’t go to the moor,’ Austin chipped in.

  ‘The moor?’

  ‘That’s where we would have gone to search,’ Harriet said quietly. ‘That’s where we go sometimes.’

  Austin looked hopeful. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and back again. I waited to hear what he would have to say.

  ‘We can go in your motorcar.’

  ‘Another time. I have to talk to your mam.’

  ‘Where do motorcars go?’ he asked.

  ‘Motorcars can go anywhere.’

  Harriet tugged at his sleeve. ‘Come on!’

  ‘It was clever of you, Harriet, to think of giving Billy your dad’s cap to sniff, and to search.’

  She didn’t answer. They set off walking, slowly, as though whatever energy they had for the day was used up this morning, trying to turn a sheepdog into a bloodhound.

  I knocked and opened the cottage door. The room sparkled, neat, tidy and spotlessly clean. While I had dropped everything to rush to Mary Jane’s aid, she played the good housewife.

  As if she read my thoughts, she said, ‘If Ethan comes back, I want him to see everything’s as it should be. I don’t want him to think he can upset me. I won’t go to pieces because he takes it into his head to disappear.’ S
he waved at the chair by the fire. ‘Better sit down and tell me how you got on.’

  I flopped into the chair.

  ‘You mucked up your shoes again.’ She sat on a buffet and unlaced my shoes. ‘You can’t go round looking like you’ve tramped across Hawksworth Moor. I’ll polish them for you.’

  I felt too done in to argue, and did not know where to start. I should begin by telling her about Miss Trimble, but had not taken it in myself yet.

  ‘Did you go out this afternoon?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘I’ve known you for eleven hours and you don’t just wonder. What’s happened?’

  She spread a newspaper on the table, placed my shoes on it, and then brought the boot blacking box from its place on the stairs.

  ‘I’ll get to it,’ I said, thinking of Miss Trimble. ‘But I’ve learned that Ethan had quite a week last week. Saturday before last taking a collection to some miners who were on strike.’

  She brushed the mud from my shoes. ‘Yes I know.’

  ‘On Sunday, Bob told him that he’d sold the farm to Colonel Ledger.’

  She paused, brush in midair. ‘He never? I didn’t know that. What was Ethan thinking of that he never told me?’ She dabbed the brush into the polish and began to apply it.

  ‘Were you speaking? I know you weren’t getting on.’

  ‘Who’s been saying that? We were getting on fine, in our fashion.’

  ‘Saturday he took the donations, Sunday found out about the farm, and Monday lost the strike vote.’

  ‘And I’m glad he did. How are people supposed to live if they’ve no wage coming in?’ Her shoe polish applying gained a furious speed.

  ‘He found out who’d been betraying him – telling the foreman the way the vote had gone.’

  ‘Well, what’s so secret about it? There’s always some big mouth. I don’t see what any of this has to do with him being found … like Harriet said, or disappearing.’

  ‘It all paints a picture, Mary Jane, a picture of a man going through a crisis. Did he talk about any of this?’

  ‘No.’ She began applying polish to my second shoe, with a rhythmic movement, staring at the leather. ‘You think I’m hiding something.’

  ‘Either that or I’m missing something. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Well, go on. What do you want to quiz me about?’

  ‘Was something wrong between you? Only it’s bound to come out if there was. Ethan had talked to Mrs Conroy, found a sympathetic ear.’

  ‘Never!’ she picked up a polishing brush and began to furiously polish the toes of my shoes, spitting for good measure. ‘He didn’t like her. I was always the one who liked Georgina.’

  She finished polishing the shoes and returned them to me, bobbing down, putting the shoes on the rug. I looked at the top of her head – chestnut hair, with not a single strand of grey. She sat down on the chair opposite me.

  ‘Mary Jane, if Harriet’s worst fear becomes reality and the police become involved, they will start from the assumption of foul play. There’ll be a list of persons of interest. Starting from the bottom, Raymond will have questions to answer, as Ethan’s former apprentice …’

  ‘Oh you can rule that out.’

  ‘Let me finish. As Ethan’s former apprentice, he says himself he will take over the job, and this house.’

  ‘And where do we go?’

  ‘It’s a tied house.’

  The reality dawned on her. ‘But …’

  ‘Josiah Turnbull, foreman, Raymond’s father, he was a sworn enemy to Ethan and he got the better of him in the strike vote. They could have come to blows. He was the last to leave the quarry on Saturday. And then there is Colonel Ledger …’

  ‘Are you mad? The colonel …’

  ‘Ethan was a thorn in his side. The colonel admired Ethan’s skill, gave him a job to do that might well require some personal contact, with the colonel himself, or one of his minions.’

  ‘You should be writing detective stories. All this is fantastic.’

  ‘Wait. That was the list working from the bottom. You might find yourself at the top, Mary Jane, and that’s why I wish you would tell me a straight story.’

  ‘Everything I’ve told you is true.’

  ‘No. It’s not. You and Ethan had fallen out. The kids took him food secretly because …’

  ‘I wanted him to come home, that’s why I didn’t pack him food.’

  ‘You lied about why Miss Trimble took back the missal. I checked the parish register. Harriet was born way beyond nine months. A whole four weeks more.’

  She smiled. ‘All right. But she does do that to people. I’ve seen it happen. If you must know I stopped going to that church and went to the chapel. I don’t like Miss Trimble, and I don’t like the vicar. He’s a snob, dead posh, and full of himself. He has a parish with people drawing water from the well and not affording candles, and he’s had a bathroom put in and a kitchen, all done up and charges it to the parish. Ethan was right about him. And we do get on, Ethan and me. We have our differences, but we’re two of a kind him and me, mad at the world, that’s what he said, and it’s true.’ She folded her arms tightly around her and shut her lips as though she might never speak another word.

  I was beginning to feel a tiredness creeping up from my toes. The task of putting on my shoes suddenly seemed enormous. ‘Mary Jane, the reason I asked you where you were this afternoon is because something very serious happened at the vicarage, concerning Miss Trimble.’

  ‘Good. She’s a cow.’

  ‘You wouldn’t speak ill, if you knew.’

  ‘What? Are you saying she’s dead?’

  ‘Yes, and I found her. She died in my arms. It was terrible. The doctor says heart failure, but I’m not so sure.’

  She closed her eyes. ‘I’m sorry she’s dead. She was nice to me when I first came, then turned spiteful.’

  I put on my shoes. As I did up the laces, I thought, if we’d been brought up together, I would know her so well, be able to read her outbursts and her silences. ‘I’ve found out a lot today, Mary Jane. At some point it might begin to make sense. I won’t come back tomorrow. I’m going to see my father in Wakefield. Someone ought to make Sergeant Sharp take Ethan’s disappearance more seriously.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do in the meantime? I feel useless.’

  ‘What about your mother, and Barbara May? Shouldn’t they know what you’re going through?’

  She sighed. ‘As long as they don’t know, it doesn’t feel real. But I might have to tell them.’

  I stood up to go. ‘I’m not giving up. Don’t think that. If you need me, ask Sergeant Sharp to telephone me, or you can send a telegram.’

  She followed me to the door.

  I walked to my car, climbed in.

  ‘Wait!’ She was behind me. ‘Kate, wait! Budge up. I have to talk to you.’

  I moved along on the seat. She climbed in. In the distance, a train sounded its hooter.

  Not looking at me, staring ahead, she said, ‘You’re right about saying I wouldn’t go when Ethan was offered work at the Minster. I did want to leave this place, and then when it came down to it, well I just couldn’t. I can’t explain.’

  ‘Try.’

  She was silent.

  Remembering what Bob Conroy had said, I asked, ‘Is it something to do with the two children?’

  Her voice was barely audible. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Bob told me that you lost two children, and that they’re buried in the chapel graveyard.’

  She paused before answering. ‘Yes. That broke my heart.’ She looked at her hands. They were chapped and red from her day’s washing. ‘There’s something else. I expect you took a gander at my bank book. You don’t miss much.’

  ‘Yes, I saw it.’

  ‘I showed it to Ethan last week. He’d never known about it, but he was
so upset last week about everything that was happening, the poor miners, locked out and starving. It’s not a strike at the colonel’s pit, it’s a lockout. I told him, if he wanted to do what Bob said and stand for parliament, I would put us a deposit on a house, I would help him. He got it out of me, where the money came from.’

  Mary Jane came to a full stop. The shadow of the hedgerow lengthened.

  ‘Where did the money come from, Mary Jane?’

  ‘It was a kind of dowry, from Mrs Ledger, when she thought I would marry Bob Conroy. When I told Ethan, he was blue with fury. Said he wouldn’t touch the money. Swore at me, called me names.’

  ‘Did he think there was more behind Mrs Ledger’s gift than kindness?’

  ‘Yes. And he was right. I wouldn’t tell him. But that only made him imagine the worst. He says people like her don’t give money for nothing.’

  I was glad we were sitting side by side in the car because I felt that had she been opposite me, and we could look at each other, she would not speak.

  ‘I was just fifteen when I went to the Ledgers and I was pretty little thing, and very shy. Mrs Ledger made a big fuss of me. I knew nothing about being a lady’s maid. She showed me what to do. She dressed me up in nice clothes. It was like playing, having a jolly time. And I didn’t feel like a maid at all. The colonel took our photographs. Artistic, the colonel called them. I would have liked to send one home but they wouldn’t have understood. They wouldn’t have seen the artistic quality. They would have said they were saucy.’

  I wondered how saucy, but thought it best to let her keep talking. ‘Mary Jane, I’m in a photographic club. I’ve probably seen the sort of picture you’re talking about.’

  ‘So when she gave me the money, I put it in a bank book and I never told Ethan. Well, you don’t, do you? What fool of a woman getting wed would let her husband know what she keeps in reserve? Only last week, when he was that down in the dumps, and was thinking what else we would do, I said to him that we could put a deposit on a place, and he could go into business on his own account, or stand for parliament, or whatever he wanted. And he’d already started work on the sundial. I think he wanted to do it so perfectly, to show he could, and then smash it, because of who it was for. And I think that he’s gone, and won’t come back. Or else something worse has happened.’