Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  Gilbert Slack had scrambled back amongst them, dragging his crate of Transvaal hock, shrill and hilarious; hysterical almost, with delayed fear, secondary shock – and the amount he had already drunk. He swore eternal brotherhood with Frank Lomas.

  ‘And if they ride back and find us here with her body,’ Lomas told them, ‘they will hang us all from that tree – after a few preliminaries.’

  He doubled the guard. It was that night, maudlin and excitable, that Slack told him about Dead-Nettle.

  ‘The man who fills his dish in that mine, Frank, will drive his pick into a fortune. I’m telling you this, because you are my friend. There isn’t another living soul in the whole wide world that I would tell it to.’

  ‘That look on the Dutch woman’s face,’ I said to Lomas. ‘Describe it to me again.’

  He looked at me surprised. I insisted that he try to repeat his description. The second time, in cold blood, it was almost perfunctory. But I did not disbelieve either the experience or the intensity of his memory.

  ‘Now tell me about the look on Hetty’s face,’ I told him, ‘when she saw you were going to kill her.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  It did not work. I could not shock or confuse Lomas into unintentional admissions. My attempt to bully him succeeded only in destroying the rapport that had begun to grow between us. The chance to talk to me had done something for him. When I stirred up his distrust, he looked hurt. As I walked away from the mine, I knew I had done badly. It would be hard work getting our relationship back to the point where it had started.

  But I could not afford to become sentimental about Frank Lomas merely because I was tempted to like him. Reason still made him the most likely culprit, but there was nothing yet on which I felt justified in holding him. Why had he left Chapel before the end of the service? Where had he gone then and why? How came he to have blood on his boots? Why had he gone off wandering into the hills again after finding his wife’s body? His answers to those questions were artless enough to tempt belief. He had found the sermon offensive to his present condition. He had wanted solitude and physical movement to allow himself to think. When he had seen the violence that had been done at Dead-Nettle, his instinct had been to range out looking for the marauder. He was well out into the night before he realised what a purposeless chase he was on. His was not an impressive story: if it was untrue, then it was a feeble effort indeed. For that reason alone, I could not reject it out of hand. He had apparently not thought it necessary to think very hard in terms of self-exoneration.

  I had asked him what his immediate plans were and he had freely admitted that he was giving up the search for ore. Come the warmer weather, he would be on the move: but he did not want town life. Perhaps one of the pits in his home region might give him a surface job. He was a lost man, played out, thinking in vague terms of a return to the coal-field because his imagination as well as his grit seemed to have deserted him.

  I had not the resources even to keep him under adequate surveillance. I had one sergeant and one detective-constable with me, and a message to Derby asking for reinforcements was not likely to produce miracles. I set D.C. Fordyce to keep unobtrusive watch on the mine, but this was not a vigil that could be kept up round the clock. In the course of the day the interim report reached me that after mooning about on his slag-heap, Lomas had suddenly taken to clearing up in the cottage. He brought out rubble and filth, scrubbed his matting and began to dig over the earth floor where the body had lain. None of this suggested a man about to take flight.

  I went to Margreave Hall and talked first to Isobel Fuller, thinking to find her an intelligent if not placid subject. I found her attractive – a mature and bonny woman, if one looked past her immediate fatigue and distress. But it was apparent that she had been badly shaken. I do not mean that there was any marked lack of self-control. It would not be going too far to describe her for the most part as poised: a woman trained and inclined to deal with current situations and not pander to herself. Her upset took the form of a somewhat distant, almost cynical attitude to unpalatable facts.

  ‘Are you coming to arrest me?’

  ‘Do you think I ought to?’

  I could have gone on then to press her for her reasons why I should suspect her. I preferred to sit and look at her in silence for prolonged seconds, then ask her the plain and obvious questions. She had gone to meet Lomas outside his chapel, she said. There had been things she had wanted to discuss with him. There were aspects of his personal conduct on which she felt he owed her an explanation.

  ‘It was on the spur of the moment, you understand, Inspector. Arrogant of me. He owes me nothing. He is a married man, and that is the sum total of it.’

  ‘Was a married man, Miss Fuller.’

  She looked sharply at me. ‘Implying?’

  ‘Getting our tenses right. No implication. Frank Lomas usually went to Chapel, did he?’

  ‘Usually, to the best of my knowledge. I am not responsible for Mr Lomas’s movements, Inspector.’

  ‘Oh, come, Miss Fuller. You knew where to go to meet him.’

  ‘Sorry. Yes, I did.’

  ‘But you weren’t in the habit of going to Chapel with him?’

  She laughed, drily and briefly. ‘I don’t – didn’t – share his views, Inspector. Merely respected them.’

  ‘Now it is you who are speaking in the past tense. Of a man who is still alive.’

  ‘A manner of speaking. What does it matter what tense I use?’

  ‘It might suggest a change of attitude towards the man.’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  I find that with normally intelligent people who are being unreasonable under distress, silence is often more effective than vituperation. I sat looking uncomfortable and said nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry, Inspector. I’m tired.’

  ‘And not quite sure of your own mind.’

  I said this as gently as I could. I was not being provocative. She looked the type who would presently settle down and co-operate.

  ‘Of course, you are right,’ she said, having herself used a moment of silence instead of rhetoric. ‘And dangerously near to stepping outside the limits of your duty.’

  ‘My duty has no limits – in a case like this.’

  She looked at me more keenly. ‘You mean that your mind wasn’t made up about the murderer, the moment you heard the facts of the case?’

  ‘Should it have been?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Please don’t try to put words into my mouth.’

  ‘It is enough for me to know that you have them on your mind.’

  ‘What’s on my mind – or what you think is on my mind – is hardly evidence, is it, Mr Brunt?’

  ‘Not evidence at all. But it might help me on my way to the truth – which is what interests me. You too, I I hope.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘I would have thought –’

  ‘As a policeman, it has become part of your second nature to ferret out facts. I’m not sure that the truth will do anyone any good.’

  ‘Not even if it clears those unjustly suspected?’

  ‘That, yes. I suppose I must be one of your suspects too. I dare say I can live with the thought.’

  ‘Do you think that Frank Lomas could have killed his wife?’

  ‘I’d rather not answer that.’

  ‘Thank you. You have answered it.’

  ‘Let us not play dramatic games, Inspector. Most of the men who have known Hetty Lomas, and any man married to her, must surely have come near to murder on occasion.’

  ‘You knew her well personally, I take it?’

  ‘I talked to her for five minutes, the day before yesterday, when I went to collect the rent.’

  ‘So you are accustomed to making confident judgements? You heard a lot about her from Lomas perhaps?’

  ‘Never a word. That is what –’

  ‘Rankles?’

  ‘That is what I wanted to see him about on Sunday e
vening. Or should I say half wanted to. I was more than half relieved when he was not there.’

  ‘You were going to take him to task, because he had not told you about his wife?’

  ‘Not take to task – well, yes – take to task.’

  ‘You considered him under that kind of obligation to you?’

  ‘Not an obligation, Inspector. But in the nature of the relationship between us –’

  She stopped. What she had been about to say needed better wording.

  ‘How would you summarise that relationship, Miss Fuller?’

  ‘We were friends.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And when I saw her anger gathering, I added, ‘I am not saying yes satirically. I accept what you say. Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Mr Brunt, I laughed just now, when you asked if I used to go to Chapel with Frank. That would have given Margreave some complex satisfaction. My God, I wish now I had.’

  She closed her eyes, partly from weariness, partly to help herself to think.

  ‘I expect you’ll have heard – I expect people met your train to tell you on the platform – that I once spent a whole night at Dead-Nettle – that being, in the circumstances, the only balanced and sensible thing to do. What is so outrageous in a night spent in a cottage? If we had wanted to comport ourselves as everyone assumes we did, what would have been wrong with half past ten in the morning? Inspector, I wish you could have seen how Frank behaved that night. It would have been laughable, if it hadn’t been so genuine. His modesty and prudence were out of this world. He went out of his way at the beginning to tell me I had nothing to fear. To fear! He gave me his bed and slept somehow himself downstairs. He wouldn’t even come up into the second bedroom. And he went out into the stable while I undressed, wouldn’t come into the house again until he saw that my candle was out.’

  Later, before I left Margreave, Lomas was to pour out his heart to me about this and many other things. He told me how he had gone out into the snow that night while she got ready for bed. But it had not been her modesty that he was protecting. It was himself; he wanted her so badly. And for a long time after going back into the cottage he lay awake wrestling with tension – with the temptation to go up the ladder, to make a noise, to wake her, to have her to talk to him in the hope that that might lead them together. He resisted – partly because he could not bear to associate Isobel with the way he had made love to Hetty.

  Later on, after Christmas, they did make love. He told me that simply, and without embroidery. I formed the impression that they moved towards the act together, perhaps after a chance physical contact. It happened more than once; regularly, I presume, in February and March. But they had not so far made any permanent plans, though they both knew that the necessity to do so hung over them. They were loving each other out of natural necessity, there being some vague point ahead of them, the end of the winter, when they knew they would have to face up to practicalities.

  I learned, of course, none of this from Isobel Fuller herself. I would not have expected to.

  ‘We were good friends,’ she said. ‘Very good friends indeed. I will not try to hide the fact of the matter from you, Inspector: if he would have considered marrying me, I would have taken him with joy. But I had to wait patiently for him to see his way through problems that afflicted him alone. And my God, I know now, what those problems were. I had a future all mapped out for us.’

  ‘And may I ask what it was?’

  ‘Margreave Hall will be mine when my father dies. The sooner we can get rid of Slack and Burgess, the better. Then Frank can come in from the mine and take charge of the work they are playing with. He can start learning to manage the estate. It is a job he could do to perfection. Ultimately, then, he could be its master.’

  ‘You hadn’t mentioned this to him?’

  ‘You do not know Frank. To present such a plan to him prematurely would be fatal. He might even have upped sticks in a gallant bid to save me from myself.

  That’s just how he would probably have put it: a natural candidate for the Round Table.’

  ‘There may be time for you yet,’ I said.

  She lowered her eyelids. ‘Don’t, Inspector. Don’t try to work things out for us.’

  As I have mentioned, she knew by this time that she was pregnant by Lomas, but she did not tell me this; simply continued with her rationalisations; the truth, but only part of it.

  ‘Can’t you see now why I felt bitter? Why I was relieved to escape that Sunday evening? Why I was only half anxious to confront him? Why I believe that I had the right to know that he was a married man? When I first heard that she had come, my fury was unbounded. I made an excuse to go round and see her; malicious curiosity, as much as anything else. And I’m glad I did. It helped me to get her and Frank into focus. I knew then that Frank was free from blame – except perhaps for sheer stupidity. He hadn’t done much wrong in my book for having tried to forget a woman like that. But where had she been all these years? Had he ever gone into the legal aspects of her having deserted him? Had he messed up his chances of a divorce by having her back to live with him? He is the sort of man who will accept as his natural lot a misfortune of any magnitude. That’s one of the things that rankles with me most: the fact that he never trusted himself to discuss any of this with me at all. We might have found a way out of his problems together.’

  ‘And all this is what you’d have talked about on Sunday evening?’

  ‘I’d have seen how things went. I’d have brought things out into the open, at least.’

  ‘Instead of which, when he wasn’t in Chapel –?’

  ‘I went for a walk in the dark – to try to think things out more clearly. To try also to stay out until my father had gone to bed. He was on the verge of asking questions.’

  ‘You didn’t think of going to visit the Lomases at home?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That had never occurred to you?’

  ‘It had occurred to me. I’m ashamed to say that I shirked it.’

  ‘So which way did you go?’

  ‘Up Ranters’Hill by Thorn Farm.’

  ‘What were you wearing?’

  She looked at me with surprise and some apprehension – even more so when I wrote down a list of the items in my book. It was the first thing she had said that I had noted down.

  ‘And where are those things now?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Put aside for the wash, mainly. It was a muddy night. I got pretty filthy.’

  ‘If I could examine those things, Miss Fuller – now, if you please. They might be a useful source of elimination.’

  She sighed.

  My interviews today seemed to be following a melancholy pattern. They tended to end on a note that destroyed the confidence that

  I had been at such pains to build up.

  Chapter Eighteen

  She led me up by the back stairs. I took it that this was simply a short cut. There was no social artificiality about the Fullers. We came to a bedroom corridor on which a servant was putting soiled linen into a bolster-case. Esmond Fuller kept, according to the standards of the time – and especially in view of the image which he had originally come to Margreave to display – a relatively modest establishment. Consequently Isobel controlled the work of the household with some knowledge of its detail. In the few words which she exchanged with this elderly woman, for example, she showed that she knew the peculiarities of individual sheets.

  ‘Wash-day tomorrow. A woman comes in Tuesdays early. So you’re here on the right day.’

  She took me into a dressing-room, now used as a sort of clearing-house, and pointed to yesterday’s clothes on a pile. There was certainly mud in profuse evidence. A damp stain had gone through a frock and carried blue dye to her underskirt. A cashmere stocking had been torn by a thorn. Thanks to the developments of forensic science, I could doubtless have provided a merry old time for our under-manned county laboratory with brushings of dust. I did not think that it was worth
taking samples for analysis, just to show she had been where we knew she had. It was blood that I was looking for. The absence of it would prove nothing to us; its presence would be highly suggestive. There were a few specks where the thorn had torn the stocking, nothing more.

  I have said: an attractive woman. I could not look at her without wondering about the details of her intimate life with Lomas. It is a common belief that in the matter of sexual relations, it is the man who gets the most obvious and immediate relief: a relief therefore to which he commonly attaches more importance than the woman does – unless or until the woman is happily experienced or well taught. Had Isobel Fuller gone to Frank Lomas more for his sake than for her own? Was she experienced? How sensitively had Lomas managed to school her? Was it possible that, apart from the complications of his own abstinence, the lessons he had learned from Hetty Wilson had stood him in good stead? Presumably he had overcome the false guilt of associating the two women. There were questions about Isobel Fuller that I could not ask. And I could not solve them by simply looking at her. I dropped the stockings back on the pile.

  ‘I suppose none of us is to be free from your obnoxious attention? And the more innocuous and uncomplaining we are, the longer will be our contribution to your time-sheet?’

  I turned and saw that Fuller had come in behind us.

  ‘Elimination,’ I said. ‘The sooner it’s achieved, the more comfortably we can all talk.’

  He grunted. There are two kinds of successful retired men. One attempts to carry over into private life the bustle and command to which he has become accustomed. The other will struggle, perhaps to the point of nervous disruption, to thrust these behind him. Fuller I placed in the second category, but making an aggressive excursion into the first in defence of his own.