by Robin Blake
‘Dr Fidelis? I assure you he is the soul of trust and unparalleled in the examination of a body post mortem.’
‘Not for us he’s not. He cuts bodies up and takes bits out of ’em and suchlike. Made a terrible mess of Mr Scroop’s head, he did. Well, I’ll go back to the lads. We’ll have a decision for you shortly and then all you Preston folk can bugger off home.’
When the verdict came back it was not what I wanted to hear: ‘death by manner and means unknown’. As a matter of form I thanked the jurors before discharging them, but it galled me. They had utterly failed in their duty, of course, but I blamed myself. I’d concentrated on the witnesses and quite neglected the jury. Formerly as Coroner in Preston I had known most jurors in person and they knew me; here, as County Coroner, I was a stranger, an object of suspicion come in from the big, bad neighbouring town. This prejudice, I told myself, was the entire reason why Fidelis’s findings and my own summary had not made its mark with them; indeed, many had wanted to depart even further and designate the overhanging oak tree as Scroop’s killer.
‘You can take comfort from having escaped that humiliation at least,’ as Elizabeth pointed out to me in bed that night.
‘But why is no one questioning Harrod’s conduct?’ I asked. ‘He seems untouched by all this. Goes around saying Fidelis and I tried to lead the inquest up the garden path.’
‘Ha! But in fact you led them up the churchyard path, and did you not find a fraudulent burial and an empty grave? You also uncovered Harriet Scroop’s pregnancy, and the truth about the baby in the tan-pit.’
‘But I can’t see the whole picture. Harrod’s not just a liar, but a murderer, I’m sure of it now. I just don’t know why.’
* * *
So matters stood until a fortnight later, when I learned the answer to this question in dramatic fashion.
For Preston’s leaders, if not for me, the Scroop inquest had ended quickly and satisfactorily. Now life in the Corporation could resume, though not exactly as before. Open debate of the future of the Marsh, and the need for a dock, had previously been prevented as a matter of policy. Now – as a matter of policy – its discussion was being vocally promoted by the politicians as a healthy thing, a necessary airing of views which would assist the town’s esteemed leaders in making the right decision. Such sudden reversals of direction are commonplace in politics but, in fact, the bruised knuckles and bleeding noses that were then suffered in the course of these free discussions were all in vain. The future of the dock project had, in truth, already been determined.
Lord Derby was so pleased with the Kirkham inquest that he wrote me this letter.
Dear Cragg, I congratulate you on your conduct of the inquest into Scroop, your first as County Coroner. A pity you could not quite reach the verdict of accidental death, but by unknown causes is almost its equal. My main wish now is to see an end to all the scurrilous talk in Preston of murder etc., but I expect this to die away naturally as the weeks and months go by. I take this opportunity to renew my invitation to you, which I mentioned at the Michaelmas Ball in Preston, for a day’s shooting. Come out to Lathom next Sunday with your gun. You will be expected at eight a.m.
Derby.
Riding south in the early morning towards Lathom with Suez bowling along the road beside me, I had mixed expectations. It was regarded as an honour and privilege to be invited to shoot on the Earl’s private land – and one that no man would dare to refuse. But who would I be shooting with? A day out and a friend for company is a delightful activity; alone it would be less so, though with Suez at my heel I would still enjoy it; but with Lord Derby walking stiffly at my side, and on his own estate, it would surely turn into a torture in which, at any moment, I might do or say the wrong thing.
I quickly learned, however, that Lord Derby was not to be my shooting companion, as the peer had gone off to London on the previous day for the sitting of Parliament. Nor was it any friend of mine, such as Luke Fidelis or Nick Oldswick – nor even my bowls rival, stationer Starkey. Instead I found that my chosen shooting companion would be Dr Basilius Harrod.
When I arrived, Harrod was chatting amiably with the gamekeeper in the stable yard at Lathom. He had a game bag and a flintlock rifle, as I did. He turned to greet me.
‘Ah, Cragg! Excellent! Mr Clarke here recommends we begin with an assault on his lordship’s woods which, if we walk all the way through them, will lead to the lake and some fine duck-shooting at dusk.’
I greeted Clarke, who said we had the freedom of the western woods and that there would be no one but ourselves legitimately there.
‘If you see anyone else,’ he said, ‘it’ll be poachers. You have my blessing and his Lordship’s to shoot them.’
For half an hour as we moved deeper and deeper amongst the trees, taking pot-shots at wood pigeons and rabbits here and there as we went, I could find little to say. Harrod, on his part, was just as he had always been with me – good-humoured, free, easy. It was as if there had never been an inquest into his friend Scroop’s death, no decision by Mrs Scroop to leave Preston with her family (as they had already done), and no suspicion in my own heart that he was a killer. Was it possible he didn’t somehow know that I suspected him of two murders? I studied the man several times when he was loading his piece, or stalking ahead of me towards a bird. I only saw the same easy-natured man I had known since childhood and, again, I found myself doubting Luke Fidelis’s thesis. How could this kindly, twinkle-eyed doctor have done those terrible things – and more importantly why? In company with him like this it did not seem credible.
We reached a place where stone had once been quarried, a flat grassy space from which rose a sheer cliff fifty or sixty feet high, the rock face being lumpy and heavily mossed.
‘Time for refreshment,’ said Harrod, taking from his satchel bread, cheese and a bottle containing ale. Elizabeth had provided me with much the same provisions and so we both sat down on cushions of moss to refresh ourselves. I tossed Suez the bone that had been provided for him.
I was just taking a swig of beer and, with my head tilted well back, never noticed Harrod raise his gun. The unexpected noise of its discharge made my chin jerk downwards. The sticky liquid fizzed painfully back through my nostrils and on to my chest. Suez looked up from his bone and barked.
‘Got it!’ shouted the doctor in triumph, pointing to the quarry face. ‘It was right up there on that ledge! A sparrowhawk, I think.’
Mopping myself I looked around the quarry floor.
‘Where did it fall?’
‘It didn’t. It’s still up there, lying on the ledge. Be a good friend, Cragg. Climb up and get it, will you? I suffer from vertigo or I would go myself, of course.’
I have no notion of how I allowed myself to be talked into it. Some people have such powers of persuasion that it is practically impossible to say no to them. Harrod told me that he badly wanted that bird. He knew he couldn’t eat it, but he desired to have it stuffed. It would look so amusing displayed in his dining room in a bell-jar. He really must have it. It would be perfectly safe for me to climb up. It’s the sort of thing an adventurous young fellow like myself rather enjoys doing. The boy Titus, that he used to know and remembered so well, would certainly do it. I would be up there and down again in less than a few minutes. It was perfectly safe.
A few minutes later I was thirty-five feet up, working my way along the ledge. Spying the place from the ground I had not realized how narrow it was: three hand’s-breadths at most. I was inching along it, urged by Harrod’s pointing finger.
‘It’s just there, don’t you see it? No, a little further along. Keep going. Keep going.’
I couldn’t make out the bird. My back was pressed to the cliff face, my hands too. It would be practically impossible to pick this sparrowhawk up from the level of my feet without losing my balance, even if there were a sparrowhawk. I now had begun to doubt this as it occurred to me – how could I have been so stupid? – that perhaps a game was being played w
ith me. If there really were no bird of prey up here, was I in fact the prey?
‘Be damned to this Harrod. It’s not safe. I’m coming down.’
I began to move by slow degrees in the reverse direction, the one from which I had come. My mouth was dry and I tried to control my shaking limbs. I felt the lurch of a fall in my stomach and my head, and imagined the jagged wounds I would get when I hit the rocks below. I would die, that was fairly certain. Looking down, I expected that Harrod would be following my movements with his eyes, exactly as Suez was doing. But the doctor was not watching me. He was re-loading his gun.
I had just turned, to test the next place on which to put my weight, when there came a booming report. It started down where Harrod was standing, continued a fraction of a second later with a splitting crack near my feet, and dissipated in an echo that ran round the quarry. A piece of rock the size of my head fell away almost immediately below where I was standing and split into shards on impact below. I don’t know how I kept my balance.
Harrod was still holding his gun in the firing position, the barrel smoking and pointing at a target immediately below my feet.
‘Don’t imagine that I missed you, Cragg,’ he called up. ‘I am an excellent shot.’
I took another small sideways step towards the place where I had begun my journey along the ledge. It was still at least twenty-five feet away.
‘Whatever you’re doing, it’s a mistake, Harrod.’
He was busy again with the gun, finding a ball, ramming it, pouring powder into the pan, cocking the hammer.
‘The mistake is yours, Cragg, and such a simple one. But you know I always thought you a rather simple boy, though for a while a pretty one, I’ll admit – if my taste had run in that direction. But it didn’t, you see. It’s the young female that’s my passion.’
He took aim and his gun roared a second time, taking another chunk off the cliff face below where I was standing. The ledge still held.
‘Female children, Harrod?’
‘No, not children. I am not quite so perverted. Young flesh is what I crave, just at the age when the bud is opening, if you get my meaning. Being a doctor is extremely helpful in satisfying that craving.’
‘Being the friend and doctor to a family with six little girls – and all in the house next door – that must have encouraged you particularly.’
‘Oh, I arranged all that myself. Mrs Scroop was an easy mark. Her husband was so distracted that he became complaisant, and it was quite a simple matter to inveigle myself into her bed.’
He laughed.
‘The act itself was somewhat difficult for me but I stuck to it manfully, if only for the benefits it won me with her daughters.’
His laughter was vile. It was the same laugh he used all the time, and which everyone praised for being such a pleasant laugh. Now it made my gorge rise.
‘Yet it went badly wrong,’ I called down. ‘Harriet conceived.’
‘Yes, silly girl. I shouldn’t have kept on with her but, even at fifteen, she hadn’t completely lost that look of the waif she’d had at thirteen. I simply couldn’t stop myself.’
‘Did she not resist?’
‘She didn’t dare.’
He raised the gun and fired again. The rock held firm still, losing only a chip where the ball struck. I took another little sideways step on the absurd plan that he might not notice the movement.
‘Don’t think I can’t see you creeping along, Cragg. You won’t get there you know. In a few moments that ledge you are standing on will give way and you will fall. Then I am going to walk away and – not too urgently – seek for help. By the time I return with some good samaritans you will be dead as a result of what all will accept as a foolish climb and a foolish fall.’
It seemed best to keep our conversation going. I said,
‘Why did you not stop the pregnancy? You must know how to do it.’
‘I am no Crazy Daisy, Sir! I am no abortionist. Besides I learned of it too late. So I devised a better and cleverer plan. At the end of it no one would have been hurt. If only the baby hadn’t come early, with its supposed mother far away in Yorkshire, all would have been well.’
‘But instead, when it was born, you killed it.’
‘Yes, and I had to see to it immediately – which is why I had recourse to the long bodkin, whose use your friend was lucky enough to stumble on. One scream from that baby and the whole house would have known, while its supposed mother was sixty or seventy miles away. Harriet, the little temptress, she understood it was for the best. And I had thought of the perfect place to put the bundle, or so I thought.’
His gun being loaded again, he raised it and fired upwards a fourth time. The bullet buried itself harmlessly in the trunk of a young tree growing below me out of the face of the cliff and I continued to shuffle along my ledge by minute degrees.
‘Here’s a question I would like to know the answer to. Did you set fire to the Skeleton Inn?’
‘That was no doing of mine. My guess is that it was arranged by Scroop, who was the inn’s owner. He told me months ago that he wanted to get that ridiculous man Clarkson out and regain possession. He wanted to build on the site – and now we know why. He was planning this dock.’
‘You also had reason to do it, though. You were afraid of what would emerge from the inquest into the child you killed.’
‘Afraid?’ he scoffed. ‘I was not. I’d nothing to fear from the inquest, since there was every reason to think Kathy Brock was the guilty one – which if you recall is what was concluded by Mayor Thwaite.’
‘It was a convenient verdict for you, though.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t reached for my convenience but for Scroop’s. He was the one with money and power and he wanted to hound the skinners off the Marsh.’
‘But you were friends, and you killed him.’
‘We were not friends. I hated him. When I got the opportunity to end his life, I was gratified. I loathed his plans – all this “improvement” that he loved so much. Nothing ever improves, Cragg, believe me. But I didn’t kill him for that. I did it because he had begun to suspect Harriet.’
‘He suspected that you…?’
‘Fucked his daughter? Ha-ha! No. As long as the girl said nothing I was above suspicion. Even Scroop who suspected everyone didn’t suspect me. He distrusted his wife, and his daughters; he distrusted Captain Strawboy and in the end – on my advice, as it happens – turned him out of his house; finally he distrusted the manservant, O’Rorke, and eventually dismissed him, too. But by this time the older girls had been fretting. There had been a scene at the Michaelmas Ball – remember? He had begun to form these ideas about sexual misconduct in the house, and we were afraid he would next discover his eldest daughter had become pregnant. Your damned friend Fidelis was right about the rest of it. I couldn’t allow that inscription to be used so I waylaid and killed Scroop after he’d seen the stonemason. I hid the horse and body in a disused barn until I was ready to set the scene of his supposed riding accident. Speaking of which, it is now time for your own terrible accident, I think.’
It happened suddenly. A fifth bullet was ready for firing. Harrod raised the gun, there was a crack and a puff of smoke. The ball hit immediately beneath me and all at once the ledge crumbled away like a pastry crust under my feet. For a brief moment I had the sensation of standing on air, and then I plunged downwards.
The outgrowing tree caught me. I was in it just long enough to get a firm grasp of a green branch and keep hold so that my fall was slowed. When therefore I came to ground – though one of my feet twisted as it glanced off a boulder – I had an otherwise soft landing. I rolled over and saw Harrod fiddling another ball into his gun. I got up and ran towards him, barging him with all my strength. The gun went one way, he went another. I heard the crack of a bone and his yell of pain.
We found later he had sustained multiple fractures of the arm. Now he lay on the grass whimpering pathetically while Suez stood over him with ears p
ricked and tail wagging and I carefully reloaded my own weapon.
Chapter 32
‘I’M LEAVING. I’M taking ship for America.’
Fidelis and I were drinking together with Joss Kay at the Turk’s Head. It was two or three weeks later. Kay had stayed on in Preston at Lord Derby’s request – and expense – to continue his work at the Marsh, so the announcement that he was leaving took Fidelis and me by surprise.
‘What about the dock we have been promised?’ I asked, pouring him a glass of Noah Plumtree’s punch.
‘Well, my survey is finished – as far as it can be.’
‘That doesn’t sound finished at all,’ remarked Fidelis.
‘It’s not. Or not in the way we all expected, though I have come to a conclusion.’
‘Which is?’
‘That a dock can never be built in the Marsh. I have tried everything Mr Steers taught me. I’ve looked at every angle. I’ve calculated the whole watershed, and the length and capacity of the pipeage required to drain it. I’ve taken into account the tidal variations. I’ve calculated the manpower for digging it out, and how much material in tons would be needed for the dock’s construction. But it won’t do. There are too many imponderables and not enough money.’
‘So we won’t have a dock at all?’ put in Fidelis.
Kay shook his head decisively.
‘No. It will cost far more than Preston can afford. Even with Scroop’s investment it would have been out of reach.’
‘What about Lord Grassington?’ I asked.
‘I believe he’s left Preston entirely.’
‘He has, and vows never to return,’ said Fidelis. ‘I believe Captain Strawboy’s behaviour had much to do with the matter. He’d lately fallen out with Lord Strange over a girl and his gambling debts have reached a dangerous height. The Sultan shan’t have his bout against the Second Hercules now, I fear.’
‘What does the Mayor say about your damning verdict on the proposed dock?’ I asked Kay.