‘Joseph Levy seems to have paid attention.’
‘Sadly for him, yes. But it still leaves more questions than we have answers for. I’d be interested to know if these other men who claim to have been robbed were also distracted by a pretty face.’
‘She sounds almost too noticeable to be used as bait.’
‘True, but if she keeps her distance, and if she and her male companion spread themselves around, they could get away with a great deal.’
‘But not with murder, Mickey.’
‘Odd, though, don’t you think? I mean, I’m speculating with too little information right now, but from what I was told, these robberies were opportunistic. A bit of cash, a watch, a sovereign. Causing a death – now that’s a whole other level.’
‘It could have been an accident. Joseph follows the girl, as planned, perhaps, but then he fights back. Or maybe they suspected him of carrying more money than he actually had. The boy was clearly respectable and was wearing a good coat. Perhaps he disappointed them?’
Henry yawned. ‘I confess to being tired.’
‘Good. Then you’d best get to sleep while your body is still of that mind. It will be a busy day tomorrow, but maybe we can get the lad back to his family and be on the trail of whoever deprived them.’
TEN
The overnight frost looked to be set in for the entire day and the grass crunched beneath their feet as they set off to view the place where the body had been found, Jed Fox and his dog, Sally, leading the way.
‘Big skies,’ Mickey commented. ‘I suppose that’s one advantage of living in flat land.’
Henry set the pace, despite not knowing where he was going, taking long strides and hurrying everyone along. He’d slept quite well but had woken feeling impatient and angry, and he couldn’t quite understand what the source of it was. He had decided that exercise would be the remedy. Jed seemed unfazed by the speed at which Henry moved them on, and Sally simply ran around in circles, sniffing everything, clearly enjoying the frosty morning. Jed pointed out anything he thought might be of interest to the two policemen.
‘That cottage in the distance, that’s where I was to take the rabbits. I still got there but a little bit late, so she had to wait till morning, until the stiffness went off them, before she could take the skins off and get them in the pot.’
‘Rigor mortis,’ Mickey observed. ‘You forget it’s an issue in matters of butchery. I hear that with rabbits you either have to skin them right away or wait twenty-four hours.’
‘Be about right, that will. You like a rabbit, do you?’
‘I’m a bit partial, yes. What’s that over there, that bit of a ruin? I spotted it as we left the village.’
‘That’ll be the abbey. What little there is left of it. Vicar says there were monks here for centuries. And just there is where we found the body.’ Jed had paused and pointed at a clump of reeds and withies at the side of a deep dyke. ‘I reckon if the body had gone right in, it might have been summer before you got it back. It wouldn’t be likely to float this time of year, but as soon as things warmed up, he’d have come bobbing up to the top again.’
‘Do you fish many bodies out of the water?’ Henry asked.
‘One a year, maybe two. Not usually locals. Visitors decide it looks nice round here, go trekking across the fens and come a cropper. Especially when the fog comes down. It’s dangerous land for them that don’t know it.’
As is anywhere, Henry thought sombrely. He crouched down and studied the reeds where the body had been laid. Some were crushed back and he was inclined to agree with Jed’s speculation. Had someone dumped the body, rolled it and hoped that it would end up in the water, but miscalculated?
‘How would someone have got a body here?’ He stood up and looked around. Flat fields, hedges, no clear path anywhere.
‘It’s a puzzle, that,’ Jed agreed. ‘But I suppose a strong man could hoist a fresh body – not one likely to fall apart should you move it – on a shoulder. It’s not a hard walk from the village to here.’
‘But it is open ground. He could be seen.’
Eloquently, Jed spread his arms. ‘See anyone?’ he asked. ‘A whole load of nothing and no one round ’ere most o’ the time.’
‘How did you get the body back to the dairy? You said you and two others carried it and dragged it.’
Jed nodded and pointed to the clear marks on the ground, where they had pulled the body on to the tarpaulin and then pulled the tarpaulin up on to the bank and across the first field. ‘It seemed a bit disrespectful, just to pull the poor bugger along on the tarp, and we did try to carry him between us for a bit, but it’s not like he was in any fit state to sling across somebody’s shoulder, and boss thought it might be best if we kept him flat and didn’t shift about too much. So we skidded him most of the way.’
‘Joseph Levy was not a big man – tall but not heavy,’ Mickey speculated, ‘but even so it’s a fair way from the train station to here. Even if, as Jed says, he could have slung him across his shoulders, I don’t see one man doing this alone.’
Henry picked up a stick and poked around in the reeds and mud, but it was not from his desire to poke something. It was from an idea that he might find anything lost there.
‘Take us back by exactly the route you took on that day,’ he said. ‘Just so we can be sure nothing fell off the body on the way. I can imagine all of your attention was on just getting it moved.’
Jed whistled the dog and turned for home. Henry studied the ground as closely as Sally, the dog sniffing and the other following some kind of trail in his own head. He checked his watch before they left the scene and it told twenty-five minutes had passed by the time they got back to the farm and the old dairy.
‘Did you notice how long it took you to get back here?’
Jed shrugged. ‘Longer than it took us today, but not much. There was three of us taking turns, two pulling and one following behind, taking it turn and turn about, like we do with most jobs.’
‘And conditions on that Sunday, when Joseph Levy disappeared. Wet or dry?’
‘That would be the last dry day before the flood set in. Boss was hoping we could get the plough on to the land early on the Monday, but then the rain began.’
Jed glanced over Henry’s shoulder, and Henry turned to see that the farmer had come out to greet them, but his main concern seemed to be when they were going to get the body off his land, Mickey told him that the collection was due around midday. The farmer could add little to Jed’s story, confirming the weather and the time they had taken.
The constable had given Henry the keys to the dairy and they went to view the body one last time before it left, now that the light was better. Joseph Levy looked in worse shape than he had done the night before, probably because they could see him more clearly. His skin was slack and grey and mottled, putrefaction held back by the cold but still well underway, the abdomen swollen and the face puffy. Henry bent to take another look at the hands, confirming his observations that one must have been in the water for longer, the skin sloughed almost from the fingertips. The other hand was blackened but not in such a bad state, apart from the two missing fingers, probably taken by a rodent or a fox.
‘He will be a sorry sight for his family to see,’ Mickey commented. ‘I pity Abraham and his kin having to prepare this body for burial.’
‘At least they have him back. I had my doubts that they would.’
Only a little later, Henry and Mickey headed back to their lodgings.
‘So,’ Henry said. ‘I’m a stranger here. I attack and kill a young man, and I need to dispose of the body. How would I get, without being seen, from the station and its environs to where the body was dumped? How would I know where to go?’
‘Maybe not so much a stranger,’ Mickey countered. ‘Someone who travels on that train regularly and can see how the track curves and the river bends, and that there are long, straight dykes. No doubt it is a nice walk on a summer’s day, especially if
you have an attractive young lady in tow.’
Henry nodded, acknowledging the point. ‘So we make the assumption that they had some knowledge of the lie of the land. They must have taken Joseph somewhere private in order to rob and kill him, though I’m not yet of a mind that death was their original intent. They then had to dispose of the body, and we know that the girl waited in the lounge bar for them. And I’m saying them, because I still doubt one man could have got the body so far on his own.’
‘Agreed, one man to carry the body in something like a fireman’s lift, another to keep a lookout and, as Jed put it, take turn and turn about. The girl was left for about an hour, so that would just give them time, I think, which also suggests they knew where to go. Had the land been less flat, they might simply have dumped the body by the track for anyone to assume he’d met with an accident or had perhaps even thrown himself from the train. That way the body would have been found much sooner as there is little cover either side of the track.’
‘There’s little cover for anyone carrying a body, although, as our friend pointed out, there are also few people around to take note. So, we go back to the station and we trace a possible route, one that would keep them from view and allow them to reach the place where they dumped the body. Once they were away from the village, I agree that no one would have taken much notice because there would most likely be no one about to see them. A nice walk in summer would be a frigid one at this time of year, so the only people around would have been farmworkers – and there are few of those because, as Jed told us, this is a slack time for working. In that case, the lack of cover would not be such an issue, once they were away from habitation.’
They had reached the Railway Hotel and Henry pushed the door open, scraping and then stamping his feet, so as not to trail too much mud inside. Mickey paused to do the same and then went to the bar and rang the desk bell. When the landlord appeared, Mickey asked if they might have something warm to drink, perhaps a sandwich or two, as it was getting on for lunchtime.
Henry settled in a chair near the fire, his coat still wrapped around him.
‘Take off your coat, let the heat get to you, or you’ll not feel the benefit of it when we go out again,’ Mickey told him.
Reluctantly, Henry shrugged out of his heavy coat. ‘And this afternoon we board the train again and we go and see the Parkers, discover what they actually saw.’
ELEVEN
Mr and Mrs Parker lived a few stops down the line at Boston. He was a retired accountant and she taught piano to various untalented children, or so Henry and Mickey learned during the first few minutes of their visit. The Parkers lived in a bungalow and had done so for all of their married life. The half-glazed front door had panels of blue-and-green stained glass and was placed centrally at the front of their home. Mrs Parker indicated the music room off to the left and led them into the living room on their right. Their stout shoes sounded uncouth on the polished wooden floor of the hall, and Mrs Parker stared meaningfully down at their feet as though in half a mind to ask them to remove the offending articles. A bright square rug covered the centre of the floor, leaving dark boards exposed all round. The walls had been painted a drab olive and fireplace tiles were similarly brown, the tone somewhere between that of the floor and that of the walls. Apart from a clock on the mantelpiece, there was little in the nature of ornamentation, but the bookshelves either side were crammed and the bright dust covers lifted the mood of the room. It seemed to Henry that the carpets and the books had been chosen by one of the pair and the colour of the walls and lack of personal touches by another. Curious as to which was which, he asked, ‘You like to read?’
‘Oh, absolutely. My pleasure and my escape from the mundanity of the world. My husband only reads the newspapers and those little magazines you get with fretwork patterns in. Now that he’s retired and he needs a hobby, that has become his obsession, I’m afraid. He is forever turning out these funny little picture frames and letter racks.’
Mickey glanced pointedly around the room. ‘You don’t display any of them in here?’
‘Oh, good heavens, no. When he gets better at it, perhaps. In the meantime, it keeps him occupied, and for that we should be grateful. I had this dread that he might take up gardening and want to undo all the work that I have done over the years we’ve been here. Fortunately, he knows his limitations when it comes to understanding the difference between a weed and a pansy.’
The living-room door opened and a young woman came in carrying a tea tray. She was dressed in grey and her hair was held back by a little cap. She set the tray down on the coffee table and looked to Mrs Parker for instruction.
‘That will do, Betsy. We can shift for ourselves.’
Betsy departed as quietly as she had arrived.
‘Maid of all work,’ Mrs Parker said. ‘We don’t have room for a live-in, but fortunately she lives in the village and I’m getting her trained … gradually. Young girls don’t seem to want to go into service any more – they’d rather find a job in an office or a factory.’ This last word was expressed with a full measure of distaste.
She sat down and leaned forward to deal with the tea. ‘And now, gentlemen, what can I do for you? I understand you found that poor unfortunate boy? He was a little fool, though, chasing after that young woman. Anyone could see she was no good, but I suppose boys today, this is what they like.’
Henry and Mickey exchanged a glance, and Mickey took over the conversation.
‘So, tell us what happened on that day,’ Mickey said, accepting his cup of tea and helping himself to sugar cubes. The tongs ended in claws and reminded Henry of chicken feet. He found himself oddly reluctant to use them. ‘I presume you were travelling from Lincoln and Joseph Levy got on the train at the same time as you did?’
She nodded, stirring her tea distractedly. ‘He was quite gentlemanly, looked decent enough, tipped his hat when he came into the carriage and then put his case on the luggage rack. In fact’ – she narrowed her eyes thoughtfully – ‘he left his case there but he remembered to reach up and take his hat. Isn’t that strange?’
Mickey and Henry exchanged another glance. That was indeed strange, Henry thought. Of course, some people just naturally operated out of habit. It might be that Joseph always wore his hat and would have felt naked without it, so it would be a natural reaction, even when he was in a hurry. It occurred to him also that it had not been found with the body, but perhaps that was not so strange. It was most likely that a fox had taken it, or it had fallen into the water – or was left at the murder scene, in which case it might have more relevance.
‘And you didn’t speak to him?’
‘Well, we bid each other good day, but I suppose that was it. I was reading my book and my husband was reading his newspaper, and no one really makes conversation in train compartments, do they?’
No doubt she would view that as common, Henry thought. In fairness, though, he tended to avoid conversation in train compartments, too.
‘And he just sat quietly? There was nothing to attract your interest?’
Mrs Parker shook her head. ‘Then the girl got on, of course. One stop out of Lincoln, I believe, so that would have been Washingborough. I must admit I thought she looked a little exotic for such a dead in the hole place. But she took a seat and read a magazine and paid no attention to anybody either. Then, when we reached Bardney, she got off the train. The young man watched her as she left the compartment and then tried not to be obvious as he looked out of the window, but I could see what he was doing.’
‘She must have been worth his notice, then?’
Mrs Parker smiled frostily. ‘I suppose she was attractive enough – all that gaudy hair and that coat that didn’t quite cover her green frock. Young girls today! When I was a young girl, we were always taught that your coat hem should be longer than your dress hem.’
So, ankle length, then, Henry thought. Looking at Mrs Parker and making a guess as to her age, he felt it wiser not to voice
this comment and commended himself on his restraint. Mickey would be proud.
Mickey had made no comment either; he simply made a note of something in his book and then looked back expectantly at Mrs Parker.
‘Well, the girl sat and read her magazine. The young boy stared out of the window or stared straight ahead; it was clear that he was trying not to stare at the girl and she knew exactly what was going on. Her type always do.’
‘And did it look as though she always planned to get off at Bardney station?’
Mrs Parker frowned. ‘I suppose so. I didn’t really give it much thought. The train pulled into the station. She got up and off she went. He, of course, was looking out of the window. I told you that already. Then, all of a sudden, he got up, picked up his hat and went chasing after her.’
‘Have you any idea what made him do that?’
‘I could see the girl on the platform and I suppose it was because she was having an argument with somebody. Maybe he was worried about her. Fancied himself as a gallant, I suppose.’
Mickey wrote this down in his notebook and glanced over at Henry. This was something they had not heard before. ‘Did you mention this to the constable, who spoke to you before?’
‘I really don’t remember. He telephoned just as we were ready to go out, leaving for a friend’s party, and the car was waiting for us. He promised he would only take a moment of our time and so he did. I just confirmed that I had seen the girl and the boy at the station and that he’d followed her off the train.’
Henry shifted restlessly, annoyed that they could have had this information much earlier. Mickey cast him a swift and warning glance.
‘Who was she arguing with?’ Henry asked.
‘A young man. There was a second one with him, but he was standing a little way off and keeping his mouth shut. I fancied the two of them – the girl and the young man she was arguing with – might have been in some sort of relationship because they were going at it hammer and tongs. As though picking up on something they had disagreed about earlier, if you get my meaning.’
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