Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness

by Sally Spencer

  And in what way could Huggins be important to anyone’s plans? There was only one answer to that: he had a narrowboat, and was needed to transport the stolen jewels!

  Now was not the time to point all this out to Inspector Drayman, Blackstone accepted. But later there would be an opportunity, and Drayman would be forced to admit that the man who had saved Blackstone’s life was no fantasist, but a hero who had forfeited his own life in an attempt to see justice done.

  Inspector Drayman appeared in the doorway of the office, looking very agitated.

  ‘We finally have a report of a definite sighting of Margie Thomas yesterday,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s your witness?’

  ‘The landlord of the Townshend Arms.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Just before you reach the flashes, on the road to Marston. He says he was standing in his yard when she walked past the pub.’

  ‘And he’s sure it was her?’

  ‘Absolutely sure. He knows the girl well enough for her to have stopped and told him she was going to stay at her grandmother’s.’

  ‘Does he know roughly what time it was when he saw her?’

  ‘It was just before noon. He remembers that because, as she was walking away, he heard the grandfather clock chime in the bar. And that fits in with the other things we know about her movements. She left the bakery at about a quarter to twelve, and it would have been a fifteen-minute walk from there to the Townshend Arms.’

  Blackstone checked the clock on the wall. It was twenty-five minutes to twelve.

  ‘Why don’t we try covering the same route at roughly the same speed as the girl did?’ he suggested.

  ‘Will that do any good?’ Drayman asked hopefully.

  ‘Well, it can’t do any harm,’ Blackstone replied, trying to sound encouraging.

  They reached the Townshend Arms at noon, just as Margie Thomas had done twenty-four hours earlier, and then they walked towards Marston at the pace that they calculated a thirteen-year-old girl—in no particular hurry to reach her destination—would have gone at.

  Blackstone was struck afresh by the sheer concentration of industry in the area that fringed the flashes on either side of the road, but while the smoke from the chimneys of the mines and salt works was clear evidence there were a great many people in the immediate vicinity, he noted that there was not a single soul on the cinder road.

  ‘It’s always like this at this time of day,’ Drayman said, reading his thoughts. ‘Give it half an hour and all the salt works will be knocking off for their dinner break. Another half an hour and the market will close. By quarter past one this road will be as busy as any of your posh London thoroughfares, but, at the moment, nobody’s got any reason to be here.’

  At the edge of Marston the mineral railway line cut across the road on its way to the mines beyond the village. As Blackstone and Drayman reached that point in their journey, they saw that a railway signalman was in the process of pushing the gates on to the street, in order to open up a passage for the train and block that same passage to road-users.

  ‘Do you do this at the same time every day?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘No,’ the signalman replied. ‘We take Sunday off. But every other day of the week, the train comes through here at twenty past twelve, on its way to the mines.’

  ‘And once it’s gone through, what happens? Do you open the gates immediately?’

  ‘No, that’d be a complete waste of my time an’ energy.’

  There was a roaring sound in the near distance, and a steam train, pulling half a dozen empty salt wagons behind it, came rushing into view. As it thundered over the road, the crossing gates rattled furiously, and when it was gone, the air was filled with the smell of burnt cinders.

  ‘Why would it be a waste of time to close them?’ Blackstone asked, when his hearing had returned to something like normal.

  ‘Because I’d only have to shut them again twenty minutes later, when the train comes back.’

  ‘So you leave them closed for the full twenty minutes?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you’re here the whole time?’

  ‘Not much point in going away, is there? There’s not a lot you can do in that time.’

  Blackstone felt a dark foreboding in the pit of his stomach. ‘When you were here yesterday, you didn’t happen to see a girl, did you?’ he asked.

  ‘She’d have looked twelve or thirteen. She’d have been wearing a green dress and carrying a basket.’

  The railway official shook his head. ‘There was no one like that,’ he said confidently. ‘I’d have noticed if there had been.’

  So Margie Thomas had never reached Marston, Blackstone thought.

  He turned to Inspector Drayman. ‘Have you had the flashes dragged yet?’

  The local policeman looked worried. ‘Do you think I need to?’ ‘Yes,’ Blackstone said. ‘I rather fear you do.’

  *

  The Stanford family lived in a large and pleasant detached house on the edge of the town. It was a maid—rather than a butler—who answered the door, but even so, Superintendent Bullock had been quite right when he’d suggested that they were not short of a bob or two.

  Bullock and Ellie were shown into a large reception room, where Lucy’s mother and father were waiting to receive them. The wife was sitting in a high-backed chair and was gripping the armrests so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. Her husband was standing by her side, with his hand resting comfortingly on her shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you at a time like this, but there are some details I need to take down,’ Superintendent Bullock said softly. ‘If I could leave it until later, believe me I would.’

  The father nodded gravely. ‘Of course.’

  ‘When did you first discover your daughter was missing?’ Bullock asked.

  ‘This morning, when one of the maids took a bowl of hot water up to her room. The girl saw right away that Lucy’s bed hadn’t been slept in, and immediately reported the matter to me.’

  ‘Did your daughter often leave the house without informing you?’ Bullock wondered.

  Mr Stanford stiffened. ‘Certainly not. This is a very respectable household, and Lucy was a very well-brought-up young lady.’

  His wife emitted the smallest of sobs. ‘Tell them the truth, Reginald,’ she said.

  ‘This is all very distressing for you, my dear,’ her husband said solicitously. ‘Don’t you think it might be much better if you were to retire to your day-bed for a while?’

  ‘Our daughter is dead!’ Mrs Stanford screamed. ‘What’s the point in lying about her now?’

  ‘Really, my dear, I do think you should—’

  ‘Tell them the truth, Reginald! For God’s sake, just tell them the truth!’

  Mr Stanford cleared his throat. ‘As I said, my daughter was well bred and well mannered,’ he began, ‘but she was a little headstrong, as girls of her age can sometimes be.’

  ‘She was seeing a young man,’ Mrs Stanford said.

  ‘A hooligan!’ her husband unexpectedly exploded. ‘A lout! I should have had him horse-whipped.’

  Mrs Stanford reached up and grasped her husband’s hand. Her anger appeared to have drained from her, but she seemed even more distraught than she had when they’d first entered the room.

  ‘Please let me speak, Reginald,’ she begged. ‘Please let me tell them what it is that they need to know.’

  Her husband looked up at the ceiling. ‘Very well,’ he said, in a distant voice. ‘If you feel you must, then you have my permission.’

  ‘Lucy met the young man—his name’s Jamie Green—at the home of the Carlisle family,’ Mrs Stanford said shakily. ‘The Carlisles have stables, and Elizabeth Carlisle is—was—a great friend of Lucy’s, so Lucy often used to go there to ride.’

  ‘And did this Jamie Green also go there to ride?’

  ‘No, he was a...a groom in their stables.’

  ‘I see,’ Bullo
ck said.

  ‘I can understand why she was attracted to him,’ Mrs Stanford continued. ‘He’s a very handsome boy. And, by all accounts, he’s a very nice boy, too—sensitive and understanding. Only...only...’

  ‘Only, he’s simply not from the right background to know your daughter socially,’ Bullock supplied.

  ‘Exactly,’ Mrs Stanford agreed gratefully. ‘They had no future together, and she’d have known that if she’d taken the time to think about it. But the young simply don’t do that, do they? They never think about the future. All they care about is the present.’

  ‘When you found out what was going on between them, you forbade her to see him again?’

  ‘We did more than that. My husband told Augustus Carlisle—Elizabeth’s father—about it.’

  ‘Carlisle should have dismissed the young ruffian on the spot,’ Mr Stanford said, his eyes still directed at the ceiling. ‘That’s what I would have done—thrown him straight out on to the street without a reference, and warned him that if he attempted to go near Lucy again, he’d end up in gaol.’

  ‘But Augustus didn’t do that,’ Mrs Stanford continued. ‘He’s a very kind man and—’

  ‘He could afford to be kind!’ her husband interrupted. ‘It wasn’t his daughter the hooligan was making eyes at.’

  ‘And he used his contacts to find the boy a new position in a racing stable near London.’

  ‘So instead of being punished, he got a promotion of sorts,’ her husband said. ‘So much for “the wages of sin”, eh?’

  ‘So Jamie left the area, and we thought that was the end of it,’ Mrs Stanford told the superintendent.

  ‘But it wasn’t?’ Bullock asked.

  ‘No, I’m afraid it wasn’t. I was in the centre of town a few days ago, and through my carriage window I caught a glimpse of him.’

  ‘You never told me!’ her husband said, outraged.

  ‘I know that, my dear, and I’m very sorry for it,’ Mrs Stanford said. ‘I knew at the time you should have been informed, but I wanted to save you the distress.’

  ‘So you think that when your daughter left the house last night, she did it of her own free will, and for the purpose of seeing this young man?’ Bullock asked.

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘And do you think it’s possible that it was this same young man who killed her?’

  Mrs Stanford raised her hand to her mouth in horror. ‘Oh, good Lord, no,’ she said; ‘Jamie wouldn’t have harmed even a single hair on Lucy’s head. He loved her.’

  Four

  Blackstone and Drayman watched as the uniformed constables clumsily manoeuvred unfamiliar rowing boats back and forth across the flashes that lay on each side of the raised cinder road.

  They had been there for over an hour, and in that time the sky overhead had turned from bright blue to slate-grey. Blackstone hoped that wasn’t an ill omen—but rather feared that it was.

  ‘Even if the poor little bugger is somewhere down there—and I pray to God she isn’t—we might never find her,’ Drayman said gloomily.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Blackstone wondered.

  ‘I say it because I know the history of these flashes. When I was a kid, they weren’t even here. Where the flashes are now, there used to be a fair number of mines.’

  ‘Working mines?’

  ‘Some of them were still working, yes, but most had been abandoned long ago. Anyway, early one morning—and totally unexpectedly—the ground started to give way.’

  ‘Was it quick?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Not at first. At the beginning it was such a gradual process that there was time enough for word to get around, and when the real slippage eventually got under way, quite a crowd had gathered—and I was part of it.’

  Blackstone grinned, despite their sombre mission. ‘So you were a witness to history?’ he said.

  ‘You could call it that if you wanted to,’ Drayman agreed. ‘Or you could call it being a witness to man’s folly—to his inability to understand that if you keep on raping and pillaging nature, then eventually nature is going to start fighting back.’ He coughed, somewhat embarrassedly. ‘Sorry about that, Sam. I didn’t really mean to get on my high horse.’

  ‘That’s quite all right; we all have horses we feel like jumping on occasionally,’ Blackstone assured him. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘The more the land slipped away, the faster the process became. I remember one old pumping station that went in no time at all. A solid brick building it was, but one minute it was there, and the next it was gone. And the people who were watching cheered—as if they were watching a circus, instead of being given a foretaste of what could well be the future of their own homes and businesses.’

  ‘People are like that,’ Blackstone said, philosophically.

  ‘Then it all went,’ Drayman continued: ‘the other buildings, the winding gear, any trucks they hadn’t been able to remove in time—all of it—straight down into a bloody big hole.’

  ‘When did it start to fill up with water?’

  ‘Almost immediately. There was a brook running across part of the land, you see, and that brook was connected to the river. Well, once the water found it had a hole to fill, it bloody well filled it. Do you know, the river actually ran backwards for a few hours while the crater was filling up.’

  ‘Now that certainly must have been something to see,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘It was. But it’s a bit like watching a man cut his own right arm off—you can only see him do it once.’ Drayman coughed again. ‘Anyway, now you know the history, you can probably understand why dragging these flashes is more difficult than dragging any normal stretch of water.’

  Blackstone nodded. ‘A normal lake is shallow at the shoreline and deep in the middle, but I imagine the same rules don’t apply here.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Drayman agreed. ‘At some points around the edge, the flashes plunge straight down, thirty or forty feet. Or even further, for all I know. And at some points in the middle you run a risk of scraping the bottom of your boat on some of the old mine buildings, which didn’t quite collapse. Then, of course, there are the tunnels from the old mine workings. We can only see the water on the surface of the flashes, but there must also be underground lakes, several hundred yards below where we’re standing.’

  A constable in the furthest rowing boat called out across the water to them. They were too far away to hear what he was saying, but from his frantic gestures it was obvious that he’d found something.

  *

  They laid the girl out on a tarpaulin on the ground. It was always difficult to form a clear picture of quite what a victim must have looked like before she went through her ordeal, Blackstone thought sadly, but he would guess that Margie Thomas had been a rather pretty child.

  The dress she was wearing was made of cotton and had daisies on it, set against a green background. It was probably her best one—or, at least, her second-best—because she’d been on her way to see her grandmother. It had been ripped in several places during the struggle, and a further strip had been torn off the bottom and twisted to form a crude rope. Then the killer had used this rope to attach a large stone to her so that, once he’d thrown her in the water, he’d be sure she would sink.

  ‘He must have picked her up over his head and flung her as far out as he could,’ Inspector Drayman said. ‘It’s pure luck she landed on top of one of the old buildings.’

  Lucky for them, but not for her, Blackstone thought. Her luck had run out long before she hit the water.

  There were bruise marks on the girl’s upper thighs, her upper arms and around her neck. There was no doubt that she had been raped and then strangled—or possibly the two had occurred simultaneously.

  ‘Bastard!’ Inspector Drayman said, as much to himself as to Blackstone and the constables who were gathered around him. ‘Easy now,’ Blackstone cautioned.

  ‘Filthy, evil bastard!’ Drayman said.

  *
/>   The constables took the girl’s body to the morgue, and Blackstone took Drayman to the Townshend Arms.

  ‘Do you have any idea who might have done this?’ Blackstone asked, when they’d both rapidly downed double whiskies at the bar. ‘Anyone in your records with a history of rape—or anyone who you’ve only collared for sexual interference before, but who might have progressed to rape?’

  Drayman shook his head. ‘Nobody at all. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in this town.’ He laughed, bitterly. ‘Sorry—what I meant to say was, “That kind of thing didn’t used to happen in this town.”’ He ordered two more whiskies. ‘What do you think are the chances of me catching the swine, Sam?’

  ‘It depends,’ Blackstone said, cautiously. ‘Nobody saw Margie after she’d gone past this pub, but it’s just possible that somebody did see the rapist, either going the same way or coming from the other direction.’

  ‘Possible, but not likely,’ Drayman said. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘We won’t know until we’ve made more inquiries.’

  ‘Come on, Sam! We covered the same route today that he must have covered yesterday. And at exactly the same time! We didn’t see anybody, did we? And nobody saw us.’

  Drayman put his head in his hands. ‘I’m never going to get my hands on him, am I, Sam?’

  ‘The odds are against it,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘It’s the killers who plan things that we usually catch—the ones who go to such elaborate lengths to hide their crime that they eventually end up tripping over their own cleverness. They set up a fake alibi, for example, but it’s never as watertight as they think, and once we’ve broken that down, we’ve got them. Or they try to lay the blame on someone else, but there’s always some overlooked detail in the trail they set that leads us straight to them rather than the man they’re trying to frame.’

  ‘But there’s nothing like that in this case,’ Drayman said.

  ‘Exactly. This is what you might call “a crime of opportunity”. The killer had no more idea that Margie would be walking along that particular road at that particular time of day than Mick Huggins had that I’d walk into the Hanging Tree just when he was in the mood for a fight.’