'The same thing that we tell the railway company,' said Colbeck with a confident smile. 'That we have made significant progress but are unable to disclose details because the killer would be forewarned and might be put to flight. More to the point,' he continued, 'the Sergeant and I want to be able to shift our interest to Kent without having any reporters barking at our heels.'
'How long will we be in Ashford, sir?' asked Leeming, worriedly.
'A couple of days at least, Victor. Maybe more.'
'Then we'd have to stay the night there?'
'Your wife will have to forego the pleasures of matrimony for a short while, I fear,' said Colbeck, 'but she will be reassured by the fact that you're engaged in such an important investigation.'
'Only when you've taken that bath, Sergeant,' stipulated Tallis.
'Yes, sir,' said Leeming.
'I expect my men to be smart and well groomed.' He turned a censorious eye on the elegant Inspector. 'Though there is no need to take my instructions in that regard to extremes.'
'We'll take an early train to Ashford,' said Colbeck, ignoring the barbed comment from his superior. 'I suggest that you bring enough clothing for five days, Victor.'
'Five days!' gulped Leeming. 'What about my wife?'
'She is not included in this excursion,' said Tallis, sourly.
'Estelle will miss me.'
'The sooner we bring this investigation to a conclusion,' observed Colbeck, 'the sooner you'll be back with your family.But we must not expect instant results here. The only way to solve the murder of Jacob Guttridge is to find out what really happened to Joseph Dykes.'
'But we know that,' asserted Tallis. 'he was killed by Hawkshaw.'
'That's open to question, Superintendent. Far be it from me, as a barrister, to question the working of the judicial system, but I have a strange feeling – and it is only a feeling, not a theory – that there was a gross miscarriage of justice on the scaffold at Maidstone.'
CHAPTER SEVEN
Nothing revealed the essential difference between the two men as clearly as the train journey to Ashford that morning. Inspector Robert Colbeck was in his element, enjoying his preferred mode of travel and reading his way through the London newspapers as if sitting in a favourite chair at home. Sergeant Victor Leeming, on the other hand, was in severe discomfort. His dislike of going anywhere by train was intensified by the fact that his body was a mass of aching muscles and tender bruises. As their carriage lurched and bumped its clamorous way over the rails, he felt as if he were being pummelled all over again. Leeming tried to close his eyes against the pain but that only made him feel queasy.
'How can you do it, sir?' he asked, enviously.
'Do what, Victor?'
'Read like that when the train is shaking us about so much.'
'One gets used to it,' said Colbeck, looking over the top of his copy of The Times. 'I find the constant movement very stimulating.'
'Well, I don't – it's agony for me.'
'A stagecoach would bounce you about just as much.'
'Yes,' conceded Leeming, 'but we wouldn't have this terrible noise and all this smoke. I feel safe with horses, Inspector. I hate trains.'
'Then you won't take to Ashford, I'm afraid.'
'Why not?'
'It's a railway town.'
Lying at the intersection of a number of main roads, Ashford had been a centre of communication for generations and the arrival of its railway station in 1842 had confirmed its status. But it was when the railway works was opened seven years later that its geographical significance was fully ratified. Its population increased markedly and a sleepy agricultural community took on a more urban appearance and edge. The high street was wide enough to accommodate animal pens on market day and farmers still came in from a wide area with their produce but the wives of railwaymen, fitters, engineers and gas workers now rubbed shoulders with the more traditional customers.
The first thing that the detectives saw as they alighted at the station was the church tower of St Mary's, a medieval foundation, rising high above the buildings around it with perpendicular authority, and casting a long spiritual shadow across the town. A pervading stink was the next thing that impressed itself upon them and Leeming immediately feared that his bath the previous night had failed to wash away the noxious smell of the cesspit. To his relief, the stench was coming from the River Stour into which all the town's effluent was drained without treatment, a problem exacerbated by the fact that there were now over six thousand inhabitants in the vicinity.
Carrying their bags, they strolled in the bright sunshine to the Saracen's Head to get a first feel of Ashford. Situated in the high street near the corner with North Street, the inn had been the premier hostelry in the town for centuries and it was able to offer them separate rooms – albeit with low beams and undulating floors – at a reasonable price. Colbeck was acutely aware of the effort that it had cost the Sergeant to get up so early when he was still in a battered condition. He advised him to rest while he ventured out to make initial contact with the family. Within minutes, Leeming was asleep on his bed.
Colbeck, meanwhile, stepped out from under the inn's portico and walked across the road to the nearby Middle Row, a narrow, twisting passage, where Nathan Hawkshaw and Son owned only one of a half a dozen butchers' stalls or shambles. The aroma of fresh meat mingled with the reek from the river to produce an even more distinctive smell. It did not seem to worry the people buying their beef, lamb and pork there that morning. Poultry and rabbits dangled from hooks outside the shop where Nathan Hawkshaw had worked and Colbeck had to remove his top hat and duck beneath them to go inside.
A brawny young man in a bloodstained apron was serving a female customer with some sausages. Colbeck noted his muscular forearms and the dark scowl that gave his ugly face an almost sinister look to it. When the woman left, he introduced himself as Adam Hawkshaw, son of the condemned man, a hulking figure who seemed at home among the carcasses of dead animals. Hawkshaw was resentful.
'What do you want?' he asked, bluntly.
'To establish certain facts about your father's case.'
'We got no time for police. They helped to hang him.'
'I've spoken to Sergeant Lugg in Maidstone,' said Colbeck, 'and he's given me some of the details. What I need to do now is to get the other side of the story – from you and your mother.'
Hawkshaw was aggressive. 'Why?'
'Because I wish to review the case.'
'My father's dead. Go back to London.'
'I understand the way that you must feel, Mr Hawkshaw, and I've not come to harass you. It may be that I can help.'
'You going to dig him up and bring him back to life?'
'There's no need for sarcasm.'
'Then leave us alone, Inspector,' warned Hawkshaw.
'Inspector?' said a woman, coming into the shop from a door at the rear. 'Who is this gentleman, Adam?'
Colbeck introduced himself to her and discovered that he was talking to Winifred Hawkshaw, a short, compact, handsome woman in her thirties with a black dress that rustled as she moved. She looked too young and too delicate to be the mother of the uncouth butcher. When she heard the Inspector's request, she invited him into the room at the back of the property that served as both kitchen and parlour, leaving Adam Hawkshaw to cope with the two customers who had just come in. Colbeck was offered a seat but Winifred remained standing.
'I must apologise for Adam,' she said, hands gripped tightly together. 'He's taken it hard.'
'I can understand that, Mrs Hawkshaw.'
'After what happened, he's got no faith in the law.'
'And what about you?'
'I feel let down as well, Inspector. We were betrayed.'
'You still believe in your husband's innocence then?'
'Of course,' she said, tartly. 'Nathan had his faults but he was no killer. Yet they made him look like one in court. By the time they finished with him, my husband had been turned into a monster.
'
'It must have affected your trade.'
'It has. Loyal customers have stayed with us, so have our friends who knew that Nathan could never have done such a thing. But a lot of people just buy meat elsewhere. This is a murderer's shop, they say, and won't have anything to do with us.'
There was resignation rather than bitterness in her voice. Winifred Hawkshaw did not blame local people for the way that they reacted. Colbeck was reminded of Louise Guttridge, another woman with an inner strength that enabled her to cope with the violent death of a husband. While the hangman's widow was sustained by religion, however, what gave Winifred her self-possession was her belief in her husband and her determination to clear his name.
'Are you aware of what happened to Jacob Guttridge?' he asked.
'Yes, Inspector.'
'How did the news of his murder make you feel?'
'It left me cold.'
'No sense of quiet satisfaction?'
'None,' she said. 'It won't bring Nathan back, will it?'
'What about your son?' he wondered. 'I should imagine that he took some pleasure from the fact that the man who hanged his father was himself executed.'
'Adam is not my son, Inspector. He was a child of Nathan's first marriage. But, yes – and I'm not ashamed to admit this – Adam was thrilled to hear the news. He came running round here to tell me.'
'Doesn't he live here with you?'
'Not any more.'
'Why is that, Mrs Hawkshaw?'
'Never you mind.' She eyed him shrewdly. 'Why did you come here, Inspector?'
'Because the case interested me,' he replied. 'Before I joined the Metropolitan Police, I was a lawyer and was called to the bar. Almost every day of my life was spent in a courtroom involved in legal tussles. There wasn't much of a tussle in your husband's case. From the reports that I've seen, the trial was remarkably swift and one-sided.'
'Nathan had no chance to defend himself.'
'His barrister should have done that.'
'He let us down as well.'
'The prosecution case seemed to hinge on the fact that your husband was unable to account for his whereabouts at the time when Joseph Dykes was killed.'
'That's not true,' she said with spirit. 'Nathan began to walk home from Lenham but, when he'd gone a few miles, he decided to go back and tackle Joe Dykes again. By the time he got there, it was all over.'
'Mr Hawkshaw was seen close to the murder scene.'
'He didn't know that the body was lying there.'
'Were there witnesses who saw him walking away from Lenham?'
'None that would come forward in court.'
'Where was your stepson during all this time?'
'He was at the fair with his friends.'
'And you?'
'I was visiting my mother in Willesborough. She's very sick.'
'I'm sorry to hear that, Mrs Hawkshaw.'
'It's the least of my worries at the moment. If things go on as they are, we may have to sell the shop – unless we can prove that Nathan was innocent.'
'To do that, you'll need to unmask the real killer.'
'Gregory and I will do it one day,' she vowed.
'Gregory?'
'A friend of the family, Inspector.' A half-smile of gratitude flitted across her face. 'I don't know what we'd have done without Gregory Newman. When others were turning away, he stood by us. It was Gregory who said we should start a campaign to free Nathan.'
'Did that involve trying to rescue him from Maidstone prison?'
'I know nothing of that,' she said, crisply.
'An attempt was made – according to the chaplain.'
Her facial muscles tightened. 'Don't mention that man.'
'Why not?'
'Because he only added to Nathan's suffering. Reverend Jones is evil. He kept on bullying my husband.'
'Is that what he told you?'
'Nathan wasn't allowed to tell me anything like that. They only let me see him in prison once. We had a warder standing over us to listen to what was said. Nathan was in chains,' she said, hurt by a painful memory, 'as if he was a wild animal.'
'So this information about the chaplain must have come from a message that was smuggled out. Am I right?' She nodded in assent. 'Do you still have it, by any chance?'
'No,' she replied.
Colbeck knew that she was lying. A woman who had made such efforts to prove her husband's innocence would cherish everything that reminded her of him, even if it was a note scribbled in a condemned cell. But there was no point in challenging her and asking to see the missive, especially as he already knew that there was an element of truth in its contents. The Reverend Narcissus Jones had made the prisoner's last few hours on earth far more uncomfortable than they need have been.
'Does this Mr Newman live in Ashford?'
'Oh, yes. Gregory used to be a blacksmith. He had a forge in St John's Lane but he sold it.'
'Has he retired?'
'No, Inspector,' she said, 'he's too young for that. Gregory took a job in the railway works. That's where you'll find him.'
'Then that's where I'll go in due course,' decided Colbeck, getting to his feet. 'Thank you, Mrs Hawkshaw. I'm sorry to intrude on you this way but I really do want the full details of this case.'
She challenged him. 'You think it's us, don't you?'
'I beg your pardon?'
'You're not really interested in Nathan, are you?' she said with a note of accusation. 'You came to find out if we killed that dreadful hangman. Well, I can tell you now, Inspector, that we're not murderers. Not any of us – and that includes my husband.'
'I'm sorry if I gave you the wrong impression,' he told her, raising both hands in a gesture of appeasement. 'Very few cases are reviewed in this way, I can assure you. I would have thought it would be in your interest for someone to examine the facts anew with a fresh pair of eyes.'
'That's not all that brought you here.'
'Perhaps not, Mrs Hawkshaw. But it's one of the main reasons.'
'What are the others?'
He gave a disarming smile. 'I've taken up enough of your time. Thank you for being so helpful.' He was about to leave when he heard footsteps descending the stairs and a door opened to reveal a fair-haired girl in mourning dress. 'Oh, good morning,' he said, politely.
The girl was short, slender, pale-faced and exceptionally pretty. She looked as if she had been crying and there was a vulnerability about her that made her somehow more appealing. The sight of a stranger caused her to draw back at once.
'This is my daughter, Emily,' said Winifred, indicating her. 'Emily, this is Inspector Colbeck from London. He's a policeman.'
It was all that the girl needed to hear. Mumbling an excuse, she closed the door and went hurriedly back upstairs. Winifred felt impelled to offer an explanation.
'You'll have to forgive her,' she said. 'Emily still can't believe that it all happened. It's changed her completely. She hasn't been out of here since the day of the execution.'
Victor Leeming was dreaming about his wedding day when he heard a distant knock. The door of the church swung open but, instead of his bride, it was a plump young woman with a wooden tray who came down the aisle towards him.
'Excuse me, sir,' she said, boldly.
'What?'
Leeming came awake and realised that he was lying fully clothed on the bed in his room at the Saracen's Head. The plump young woman was standing inside the doorway, holding a tray and staring at his bruised face with utter fascination.
'Did you hurt yourself, sir?' she asked.
'I had an accident,' he replied, leaping off the bed to stand up.
'What sort of accident?'
'It doesn't matter.'
'It would to me if I had injuries like that.'
'Who are you and what do you want?'
'My name is Mary, sir,' she said with a friendly smile, 'and I work here at the Saracen's Head. The other gentleman told me to wake you with a cup of tea at eleven o'clock an
d give you this letter.' She put the tray on the bedside table. 'There you are, sir.'
As she brushed his arm, he stepped back guiltily as if he had just been caught in an act of infidelity. It was a paradox. As a policeman in earlier days, Leeming had been used to patrolling areas of London that were infested with street prostitutes yet he was embarrassed to be alone in a room with a female servant. Mary continued to stare at him.
'Thank you,' he said. 'You can go now.'
'I don't believe it was an accident.'
'Goodbye, Mary.'
'Did it hurt, sir?'
'Goodbye.'
Ushering her out, he closed the door and slipped the bolt into place. Then he stirred some sugar into the tea and took a welcome sip. A clock was chiming nearby and his pocket watch confirmed that it was exactly eleven o'clock, meaning that he had slept for over two hours. Grateful to Colbeck for permitting him a rest, he opened the envelope on the tray and read his instructions, written in the neat hand that he knew so well. Leeming was not pleased by his orders but he seized on one benefit.
'At least, I don't have to go there by train!' he said.
Ashford was the home of the South Eastern Railway Company's main works, a fact that gave the town more kudos while inflicting a perpetual clamour upon it during working hours. The construction of a locomotive was not something that could be done quietly and the clang of industry had now become as familiar, if not as euphonious, as the tolling of a church bell. Robert Colbeck was delighted with an excuse to visit the works and he spent some time talking to the superintendent about the locomotives and rolling stock that were built there. To find the man he was after, Colbeck had to go to the boiler shop, the noisiest part of the factory, a place of unremitting tumult as chains were used to manoeuvre heavy pieces of iron, hammers pounded relentlessly and sparks flew.
Gregory Newman was helping to lift a section of a boiler into position. He was a big man in his forties with a mop of dark hair and a full beard that was flecked with dirt. He used a sinewy forearm to wipe the sweat from his brow. Colbeck waited until he had finished the job in hand before he introduced himself, detached Newman from the others and took him outside. The boilerman was astonished by the arrival of a detective from Scotland Yard, especially one as refined and well dressed as Colbeck. He took a moment to weigh up the newcomer.
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