Beast of Robbers Wood (DCI Arthur Ravyn Mystery Book 3)

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  “The man I’m thinking of would exalt evil himself.”

  “That convict from Irongate?”

  Ravyn’s eyebrows lifted. “Heard that already, have you?”

  “News spreads fast in a village.” He pulled a slender mobile from his pocket. “Even faster than ever now.”

  “Have you seen sign of anyone crossing your land?”

  He pursed his lips. “No. I saw the mud, same as you, but didn’t think much of it, till now. As you say, a man might cross by night and be seen by no human eye.” He looked across the land. “Were I doing same, I’d find a barn, not abide in them woods.”

  “Not if he intended to head for the river and try for Stafford at dusk,” Ravyn said. “No going through Robbers Wood by night, so he’d have to take Old Pike to the cut off, then skirt the village till he found a river path. Plenty of chances to be seen, even by night.”

  “You’ve a point, Mr Ravyn, and the trails down to the Orm are treacherous in the dark, even for those what know their twists and falls,” Tucker said. “Still, Beast or no, the woods aren’t healthy to be in. Devil took that man’s soul, didn’t he?”

  “Someone did, such as he had one,” Ravyn said. “Tell me how you came across Lisa Martin.”

  “More she came across me,” Tucker replied. “I gave it all to your sergeant. Ain’t anything else to tell but what I told him.”

  “You weren’t here when you told him, so details may now come to mind that you might not have mentioned,” Ravyn said. “It would help our investigation immensely.”

  Tucker sighed. “Barrington swore to the repairs I set for him, but who really knew? He was in a sorry state, and not worth much any other time, so I reckoned to have a look myself. Meant to earlier, but, one thing or another, this was the first chance I got.”

  Tucker moved to the fence and placed his hand on the top rail. “I was about here, looking down, when I heard a sound. The wind, that’s what I first thought, then maybe a whimpering animal, a hurt dog, or a vixen caught in a trap. Ain’t many fool enough to trap or hunt in the woods, but some do, on the fringes.

  “I don’t go into the woods and don’t interfere with traps set by fools,” Tucker continued. “I keep myself to myself. Long as people stay out of my business, I stay out of theirs. Barrington could have done better, but the fix was good enough. I would have turned back to the house but there was something…” He paused, lifted his eyes to the wood line, and let a small breath escape his withered lips. “It didn’t much seem like the wind or an animal, and it held me where I was, wondering after it.

  “I’d be lying, Mr Ravyn, if I told you thoughts of the Beast didn’t come to me,” he said after a moment. “We all got raised with stories of the Beast whispered in our wee ears. I’ve had sheep killed or taken, as have all the Tuckers before me, and I’ve lain awake on stormy nights wondering if it was the roaring wind or the ravening Beast.” He uttered a brittle laugh. “And then that witless git comes running to me, terrified of a sound naught but him heard. Him yammering about the Beast. Who knows what he heard? Nothing, I told myself, just an excuse for a drink. But then…then…”

  “Then you, also, heard an odd sound,” Ravyn said. “Under the circumstances, another man might have cut and run.”

  “Mettle,” Tucker said, as if in that one word he summed up not only himself but all ancestors who had wrung a livelihood from the uncompromising soil. “Living out here, far from light and help, forces a man to face darkness without flinching. Not bravery, but an understanding that some things can’t be run or hid from, as they do in cities, where help is always a cry away and there are plenty of corners to cower in. The weak are murdered by their own fears, not the arrow by day or the brute by night. That is how we survive in the shadow of the Beast.”

  Tucker’s face reddened, but only Ravyn noticed. The farmer who always kept himself to himself had revealed something of his nature, and now he was shamed by that exposure. It was bad enough, he thought, to have done so in front of strangers, even worse that one of them was a foreigner, a strapper from London by the sound of his harsh tongue and clipped words.

  “The sound,” Ravyn prompted. “You heard a sound.”

  Tucker pointed off to the left. “I saw something pale moving in the darkness between the trees, seeming to glow like an eft.”

  Stark started to ask, but let his question die at a slight shake of Ravyn’s head. He inwardly sighed. Yet another peculiar word to look up, but at least they were getting something more than another blip in Hammershire’s eccentric lexicon. The guv’nor had been spot on about Tucker remembering more than he had mentioned earlier. All they needed now was for the old man to recall something worth adding to Stark’s notebook.

  “They’re rare by daylight, but hurt no one, so I watched it flit in the darkness,” Tucker said. “Then I saw it wasn’t an eft at all, but a person. I hesitated, waiting to see what was what—after all, I had heard word of the convict, though I didn’t know you’d already found him dead, and, besides, nothing good ever come out of those damned woods. When I saw the girl, I ran to her.”

  “How well do you know Lisa Martin?” Ravyn asked.

  Tucker shook his head. “Don’t get to the village much. Too big for me, you know. But I do like to stop at the Ned Bly now and then so as to drink with others. Once, her mum was showing her picture around. Proud of her, she was, for some award in school, drawing or painting or some such thing. That’s all I ever saw of her, but I knew she was missing. I didn’t think it was anyone else.”

  “Annie Treadwell,” Stark suggested.

  “Nay.” Again, Tucker shook his head. “Local. Haven’t seen her often, but often enough to know that idiot’s poor daughter.”

  “But you knew she was missing?” Stark asked.

  He tapped the mobile in his pocket. “Teype at the Ned Bly told me when I called him about the girl, but I did not ken it at the time.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of your story,” Ravyn said. He climbed over the fence. “Can you take us to where you met her?”

  Stark clambered over after Ravyn, but Tucker paused, looking not at the two detectives, but the woods. His jaw was tight and his lips were a thin bloodless line. Finally, he grasped the top railing and climbed over, careful where he placed his weight.

  “There.” Tucker pointed to a patch of ground between a line of bracken and the limit of the woods proper. He started forward, but Ravyn plucked at his sleeve.

  “Stay here with me, Mr Tucker.” Ravyn nodded to Stark.

  The sergeant snapped on a pair of gloves and moved carefully into the area where the girl had appeared. He moved slowly, head down, searching ground and shrub methodically.

  “He looking for evidence?” Tucker asked. “Like they do in Frost and them other copper shows?”

  Ravyn smiled. “If only our villains were as obliging as they are on the telly, leaving key clues at opportune times. We generally have to work harder than our fictional counterparts.”

  Tucker laughed, but it was small and forced.

  “She came out of the forest where exactly?”

  Tucker pointed a blackness between two trees.

  “Could you tell at what angle she emerged from the darkness?” Ravyn asked. “From the left or right of that point? Straight on?”

  Tucker’s brow furrowed. “Wouldn’t swear to it none, but I think it was from the right. Not hard right, but somewhat.”

  Ravyn’s eyes unfocused slightly as he recalled a photo-based Forestry Commission map. In her traumatised condition, Lisa would have avoided trees or shrubs, responding to instinct, but would not deviate from her path to any great degree. Her mind would have been devoid of anything but putting one plodding foot before the other, escaping captivity. The line he extended on the map passed close to the geographic heart of the oddly shaped wooded tract, far from her probable entry point on Flintlock Lane.

  Ravyn knew Stark liked the father for Annie’s disappearance, but Hardwick for Lisa’s. Ravyn sha
red his suspicion of Treadwell, but silently. Until they tracked down Annie, or found her body, James Treadwell was only an anxious parent. To Ravyn, Hardwick seemed an unlikely suspect overall due to his frailty, but he thought it significant Hardwick had shown no surprise at all about Lisa’s adduction from Flintlock Lane while seeming genuinely puzzled by Annie’s disappearance from the heart of Midriven.

  I can understand the Beast took Lisa Martin from Flintlock, but not Annie Treadwell. The Beast is an ancient creature tied to the woods, to the temple at its heart. It does not venture far beyond the limits of its own domain, mostly the fields and marshes westward

  Ravyn considered again the line through the heart of the woods, then extended a second from Flintlock. Their intersection was in the deepest part of Robbers Wood, far from habitation or roadway, a realm as impenetrable to human activity as to the sun’s light or the eye of Providence. Was that, Ravyn wondered, the location of the Temple of the Beast?

  No one goes to the temple, Chief Inspector, if it actually exists, as the legends claim. It may now be no more than an idea, not an actual stone-upon-stone construction, but that does not make it any less real.

  Whether or not the Beast was real, whether or not the temple actually existed, it was clear to Ravyn a human mind was at work, not a bestial entity. If, to that human agency, the Beast was a terrible reality and the temple a site of ancient veneration, then it was probable Lisa had been taken into the woods for some rite related to the Beast and perhaps its fabled temple.

  Even if Hardwick were innocent, his views still acted as a template for the kidnapper—superstitious, credulous and steeped in the darkness of centuries. The Beast was tied to Robbers Wood. Lisa’s kidnapper would hold the same tenet, would not venture far to secure a victim. With Lisa held, he would not have struck. Girls disappeared from Midriven at long intervals, not in clusters.

  Annie’s disappearance while Lisa was held captive pointed to a second mind, one unconcerned with the Beast. An acolyte of the Beast would have taken a girl from a farm close to the woods. Annie had not been taken for the Beast, but now that Lisa had escaped, a replacement would be needed. Ravyn knew he might be wrong, but everything fit the events all too well.

  What about Billy Tremble? Death from animal attack, but did that preclude a tie to Lisa’s abduction? A man who so venerated the Beast would not hesitate to kill an intruder in the Beast’s realm. He might even assume the persona of the Beast to do so.

  “Are there any logging operations in Robbers Wood?” Ravyn asked. “Any activities at all that violate the woods to any depth?”

  Tucker looked back, surprised. Expecting Ravyn to remain in a contemplative mood, he had turned his attention to the sergeant at the edge of the woods, something to take his mind away from the proximity of the shadowed forest. It was startling, then, when the chief inspector addressed him after only a few seconds.

  “Logging?” The old man shook his head. “We take firewood, but only from what’s fallen or toppled. Sometimes foresters thin the woods, but only at the edges. Conservation, they call it. Fools!” He spat a wad of phlegm. “Following laws, they say, but they aren’t. It’s the truth what can’t be spoken in an age of electronic marvels. They’re afraid of the dark, but they can’t say why.” He winked conspiratorially. “We know why, don’t we, Chief Inspector?”

  “Sir!” Stark called.

  Relieved, Ravyn joined Stark, who had moved away from the area he had been searching. He held a scrap of cloth in his gloved hand. It was the same colour and texture of Lisa’s dress. Adhering to it were strands of coarse fur.

  “We’ve seen that before, haven’t we, sir?” Stark said. “It looks the same as was on Tremble’s clothes.”

  Ravyn nodded. “Bag it. We’ll have forensics analyze it to make sure. I’ll call Angus back before he gets too far and have him send a couple of his lads to work up the area properly.”

  “Lisa’s abduction, Tremble’s death—they’re linked.”

  “Yes, by the Beast.” Ravyn smiled at the sour expression on his sergeant’s face. “Does that trouble you, Stark?”

  “A bit, but not because it means the Beast might be real,” Stark said. “It’s not, because it isn’t. Real, that is.” He searched Ravyn’s face for some indication of his own beliefs, but found none. “It’s troubling because now the villagers will see the Beast around every corner, peering in every window.” He paused. “They are all nutters, as far as I am concerned.”

  “They’re prone to see the shadow of the Beast,” Ravyn said.

  Ravyn turned and called Angus Powell-Mavins on his mobile. By the time he returned to Stark, the sergeant was stripping off his gloves, the evidence bag safe in his coat pocket.

  “Not happy, but sending two chaps up Old Pike,” Ravyn said.

  “I’ll walk down and meet them, then guide them back.”

  Ravyn nodded and returned to Tucker. “Two forensics boffins are coming back to go over that area.”

  “You found something?”

  “Perhaps,” Ravyn said. “After you met her, then what?”

  “Tharn the girl was, not heeding or kenning my words.” With the perceived outsider gone, the farmer lapsed more into vernacular, though it was uncertain whether Tucker felt relief or a release from the need to impress. “I held only to see no chase by… Well, there was no danger from nothing. I took her to the house, called Teype, and he gave me your number. The rest you know.”

  “Did you do anymore than give her that blanket?”

  “Afore you talked, I tried a wee dram on her but…” He shook his head. “Poor little mare.”

  It was clear Tucker was eager to be away from the woods. He had no more to offer. On the verge of sending Tucker on his way, Ravyn saw Stark pounding up the roadway.

  “What’s your strapper sergeant lit up for?”

  Ravyn jogged to meet him. “What is it, Stark?”

  “Just got a call from PC Lessing,” Stark said. “They’ve found Annie Treadwell’s body.”

  Ravyn’s mobile chimed.

  “I’ve relayed the GPS coordinates, sir.”

  “Lessing is certain?”

  Stark nodded.

  Ravyn lowered his head a quarter-inch, rested his chin on his clasped hands, and uttered a sigh such as Stark had never heard from him. He let his hands fall to his sides.

  “Sir, I…”

  “Give me the keys, Stark,” he said. “Stay here. Ride back with the SOCO people. Do the backgrounds and research.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And relay those coordinates to Dr Penworthy.”

  “Yes, sir.” Stark paused. “I’m very sorry, sir.”

  “Email the results of your records search as soon as you can.”

  Before Stark could acknowledge the instruction, Ravyn was gone, over the fence and striding across the fields. Tucker struggled to keep up. Stark shook his head. Occasionally Ravyn’s sphinx-like mask slipped, but never very far or for very long.

  Chapter 9

  Dead Girl

  “Correct,” Dr Penworthy said. “Superficial similarities to Tremble’s wounds. His were likely from an animal attack—do not quote me till after the postmortem. These were a crude attempt at mimicry.”

  Ravyn smiled grimly. “Sergeant Stark’s mad landscaper with a garden fork.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “One of Stark’s little jests.”

  “Very little.”

  “Spacing too even, depth the same in each furrow,” Ravyn said. “It could indeed be a garden fork.”

  “I would not be surprised, but, at any rate, something very like one,” she said. “However, until I conduct the postmortem and trace material is analyzed… You understand?”

  Ravyn nodded. “But the wounds, horrendous though they are, were not the cause of death.”

  “No, of course not,” Penworthy said. “Hardly any bleeding. A first year med student could surmise as much. The cause of death was strangulation.”

 
“Still, a savage attack.”

  “Frenzied, I’d say.”

  “Or an attempt to make it seem so,” Ravyn said. “Imitating what an animal might do.”

  “Evoking the Beast?” Penworthy suggested.

  “Perhaps,” Ravyn said. “Or to hide something.”

  “Odd you should mention that, Arthur,” Penworthy said. “I was going to draw your attention to these marks anyway.”

  They squatted by the remains of Annie Treadwell.

  “This girl has been abused.” Penworthy pointed to a pattern of dark marks on her arms. “There is similar bruising on her back, her legs as well, but above the hemline where they would not be seen.”

  “Sustained during captivity?” Ravyn asked.

  “Some are recent, but most were inflicted over a long period,” she said. “The most recent bruise, on her arm, covers an older one.”

  “Time of death?”

  “Between two and four this morning,” she said. “I’ll give you a more precise estimate after I get the weather information.”

  “Was she a virgin?”

  Penworthy inhaled deeply and shook her head. “No.”

  Ravyn stood and turned away from the corpse, a futile gesture, he knew. The image of the savaged body battled with his memory of the bright and quiet girl he had met in the parlour of the house on Water Street. Neither image would fade with time. The best Ravyn could hope for was to banish both to some obscure pigeonhole in his memory, but not just yet. First, he had to hunt down the predator who had killed her, to transform predator into prey, his prey.

  “Arthur, are you all right?”

  “I failed her, Lena.”

  She said: “There are legal limitations to what you can do.”

  “I left her in that house when my every instinct was telling me to grab her by the wrist and drag her out,” Ravyn said.

  “She didn’t ask for your help, did she?”

  Ravyn shook his head. “She declined. I should have followed my gut on this. I went against my nature.”

  Penworthy looked around, saw no one was watching, and put her hand on his shoulder. “Had you done that, she would have been sent back. In that possible world, where you dragged her from her home, I might still be standing above her body, but I would most certainly be discussing her death with an inspector still employed by the police. You know that, do you not?”