Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘You too, if you don’t mind,’ I told him. ‘What were you wearing yesterday?’

  ‘What I’m wearing now.’

  ‘You’ve changed your shirt, Father,’ Isobel said. ‘One or two other things too, I would hope.’

  ‘I’ll go and get them.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

  The things were crumpled in a heap still beside his bed. Isobel picked them up and handed them to me. I made my inspection look as desultory as possible – almost casual. But I took care to look at the places that might have been revealing: shirt front, shirt cuffs and socks above the ankle. There was no staining – no food, mud or blood.

  ‘I must also ask you to tell me your movements last night.’

  ‘I did not move from the drawing-room all evening.’

  ‘Doubtless someone will testify to that?’

  ‘Cook herself brought me a milky drink at half-past nine.’

  ‘That sounds clear, then.’

  Fuller looked at me, still smouldering. ‘It’s nothing of the sort, Inspector. If you are going to waste your time investigating my daughter and me, you might at least make a proper job of it. I had ample time between Isobel’s going out and my night-cap to have gone to Dead-Nettle mine and hacked down a dozen camp-followers.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s even better. A plain lack of alibi can sometimes be more convincing than a nice schedule of witnesses.’

  I looked in the direction of his daughter. We were pretty well through the distasteful preliminaries, and it could be important to me in the immediate future to be on easy terms with this pair. I expected now at least a glance of sympathetic assurance from her – but the look in her eyes had become strange. There was a general look of distraction that had not been there when I talked to her earlier. Fuller noticed it at once.

  ‘Have you finished with my daughter now, Inspector?’

  ‘For the time being.’

  ‘I should go to your room, Isobel. I know you had a sleepless night. Don’t just play at having a rest. Take your clothes off and get into bed. Inspector – if you and I might have a further word?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He took me down into the morning room where Lomas had first called on him and offered me claret and a biscuit, which I saw no reason to decline.

  ‘Inspector – I can’t see that you have any reason to be bullying Isobel.’

  ‘I haven’t been bullying her. One firm encounter, to clear up what had to be cleared up. Henceforward we can be purely constructive.’

  ‘I would hope so. In theory, it must have occurred to you that Isobel might have felt inclined to kill this woman from Lomas’s past.’

  ‘That is why –’

  ‘Only she didn’t.’

  He looked at me as if he were daring me to contradict him.

  ‘I have to keep my mind open to all possibilities,’ I said. ‘But it’s pretty well closed already to that one.’

  ‘So I should hope. But there’s something else that I want to say to you. If any evidence had come into my hands that would implicate Lomas, I would have been tempted to destroy it. I think I would rather pretend to be guilty myself, than see him face the music.’

  Again the challenge: calculating eyes and a jutting chin. But he did not wait for me to rise to it.

  ‘Because I am an ageing man, and I lost two years ago all that I had to lose. I do not know whether you have yet heard my story, and I do not propose to delay you with it now. When it does come to your ears, I hope you will linger between the lines long enough to understand something of what has been destroyed for me: enforced retirement, the death of my wife, this expensive paradise that has proved itself a white mammoth. Therefore I can lay some claim to knowing what Frank Lomas means to Isobel – in theory – and a good deal more about the actual facts than she would suppose. I cannot say that he was what I had initially wished for her. But that, I now think, was possibly my mistake. In fact, it is a mistake to have wishes at all in such matters.’

  He sat back in his chair and achieved a greater degree of relaxation than I had seen in him before.

  ‘Inspector, you are an intelligent man and I do not have to spell everything out for you. I am not saying that murder is an acceptable way out of any man’s impasse. Let us simply say that it would be a pity if the killing of Mrs Lomas were followed by the wreckage of anyone else’s life. That is why I fervently hope that you will fail in your present task – especially if the truth does in fact lie in a particular direction. Oh – you have no need to worry. Please do not think you have to lecture me on the gravity of obstructing you in the course of your duties. I would not really think of impeding you. I fear I am too timorous and ingrained in abiding by the law, ever to do otherwise.’

  ‘You had met Mrs Lomas, had you?’

  ‘No. But I had listened interminably to this man Slack, who tried months ago to drop sly innuendoes that there was some dry, hollow rattle in Lomas’s cupboard. I vacillated between plain disbelief and the hope that whatever it was, it was over and done with. Slack is a worthless character, as Isobel has been trying to get me to admit since he arrived. My mind is now made up to get rid of him. I shall accept the timing from you in that matter.’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘I shall retain him long enough for you to know where he is if you need him.’

  I found Slack and Burgess painting the doors and window-frames of a mid-Victorian stable that formed three sides of a square round a cobbled yard. Slack was what I expected him to be: a man trying to carry into midlife something of the dapper and dashing impact that he had cultivated in his youth. There was so much physical activity still being forced on him that he was not yet running to fat; but he was beginning to spread. If ever he came into money, he would quickly degenerate. I put on him from the beginning the staccato professional pressure that I had spared all the others. I interrogated the pair of them with irritating repetitions and confusing pretences at misunderstanding. What were their movements yesterday evening?

  ‘I’d wanted to talk to Frank Lomas, so Harry and I went to meet him from Chapel. At least, we knew where –’

  ‘Stop. What did you want to talk to him about?’

  ‘A business deal. I’d mentioned it to him before, but he hadn’t wanted to play. But I knew things had been getting pretty desperate with him in his mine, and over here the old man had been getting on my wheel. It’s time we all had a change. It had all been all right for the winter.’

  Harry Burgess blinked vigorously in agreement.

  ‘I was going to suggest a partnership. If I could only get Frank out of Dead-Nettle, there are plenty of mines round here worth working. Frank and I together – if Fuller would put up some working capital –’

  ‘But Lomas wasn’t at Chapel.’

  ‘No. But as it happened, that didn’t affect me. I had caught sight of Isobel, hanging about waiting for him, too, so it was obvious that this wasn’t going to be the night for talking business. So I thought we’d go out and see Hetty Lomas. I’d known her before, you see, in the old days.’

  He rolled his eyes in suggestive memory and Harry Burgess’s flabby lower lip dropped in a grin.

  ‘Known her in the old days? You’d been instrumental in bringing her up here, I believe.’

  Slack shook his head. ‘No, sir, ‘No, sir, thank you very much. In the old days, down in Kent, we’d all mucked in together. But if you knew Hetty’s husband –’

  ‘Her husband? You’re not talking about Lomas?’

  Slack and Burgess exchanged secret amusement.

  ‘No. Her real husband. Old Tug Wilson. Company Quartermaster-Sergeant with a battalion of the Buffs. Out on the Afghan frontier, while we were knocking about in Thanet, and God knows where he is now. But he comes round from time to time, and I wouldn’t want to tangle with him.’

  ‘You mean that the woman we’ve been calling Mrs Lomas was guilty of bigamy?’

  ‘Haven’t you forked that one o
ut yet?’

  ‘You’d better fork it out for me. And be quick about it.’

  Slack laid aside his paint brush, which he had been holding as if I were not going to interrupt his work for long.

  ‘She’d been married all the time. That’s why she’d done her best to keep putting Frank off. She didn’t mind casting around a favour or two: it was a long old lope from the Minster Marshes to the Khyber Pass. But she stopped short at that kind of complication.’

  ‘In that case, Slack, you were partly responsible for compounding a felony.’

  ‘No, sir, Mr Brunt. I compounded nothing – only a joke. All we did was to pull old Frank’s leg. You don’t know what a bloody nit he was, in his early army days. Listen – I got him in and, honestly, I got so bloody sorry for him, I began to feel responsible. I helped him out of dozens of holes. It took them a month to teach him to march. He was one of those awkward sods who swung his right arm forward with his right leg, and the more the drill-sergeant got on to him, the more awkward he became. He was what was generally referred to as a part of the female anatomy – which is being less than fair to the girls.’

  ‘Get back to Hetty Wilson, Slack.’

  ‘Yes, well, she did her best to put Frank off, but he was one of those who believed in signing in a vestry for what he’d had. Then we suddenly heard – those of us who were in the know – that the battalion’s sailing orders were through. We knew one of the Orderly Room clerks who wasn’t beyond dropping us a fruity hint. And if you had any savvy, you could work things out for yourself. We knew from one of the officers’mess waiters just when the wine merchant’s order was to be stopped. The farmer where we were camped was getting hot under his collar about the way we’d blocked off one of his hay-fields – but he’d had a quiet word we’d be out of his way in a fortnight.’

  ‘Hetty Wilson, Slack.’

  ‘Yes, well we said to her, “Put the poor bugger out of his misery,” we said. “Maybe he’ll have a Zulu warrior’s spear up his jacksey before he’s much older. Let them start giving the banns out. We’ll be ground-baiting the Bay of Biscay by the third Sunday.”‘

  ‘And it nearly worked?’

  ‘Bloody nearly. If the padre hadn’t stuck his nose in. I went round to see her the night before. We weren’t supposed to break camp, but you had to be your own master sometimes. She was packed up for off, but then the Senior Subaltern came to fix up a few things with her about tomorrow’s details. She must have got bogged down with him. I don’t know, because I had to make myself scarce. And I’ve got an idea she spent the night in officers’quarters.

  At any rate, she was on parade the next morning, dead scared, but too drunk to know what she was doing, anyway.’

  Harry Burgess’s mouth stayed open in second-to-second enjoyment of the tale.

  ‘And you stayed in touch with her?’

  ‘What, me? Find ‘em, fool ‘em and forget ‘em. I don’t mind admitting that I’d slipped in once or twice while Frank was out. She deserved a slow ride in-between times with that big old oaf, didn’t she? But keep in touch? No. Too much respect for Tug Wilson.’

  ‘Yet you brought her up to Margreave.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How else could she have found Lomas’s where abouts?’

  ‘I’ve wondered. The Regimental Depot, perhaps.’

  ‘They’d have sent her straight here, not to a rendezvous in Derby.’

  ‘I know. It’s a bloody mystery to me,’ Slack said.

  ‘Not to me, it isn’t. You brought her here to unearth a cache for you.’

  Slack laughed. ‘You’ve been listening to too much talk, Mr Brunt – and you only in the place an hour or two. There’ve always been strange tales about Dead-Nettle – and about me. You’d have a job to prove anything, Inspector.’

  It was then that I determined, childish though it might be, that whatever the outcome of the main case, I was going to see Gilbert Slack home on some indictable count before I was finished.

  ‘At least you won’t deny that it was you who gave him the idea of mining Dead-Nettle in the first place.’

  ‘We were pissed that night, both of us.’

  ‘You told him –’

  ‘How can I remember what I told him? We’d lived in each other’s haversacks for three or four years. God knows what we did find to talk about.’

  ‘Dead-Nettle.’

  ‘He’d been a miner. He often used to tell us about it: hard-luck stories about roof-falls and the fire-damp. I told him there was easier money to be dug in Derbyshire. As there is – if you know where to look.’

  ‘Which is not in Dead-Nettle.’

  ‘I said the first name of a mine that I remembered. I’d no idea that he’d ever come up here. None of us could see much further than the next dawn.’

  ‘He’d just saved your life, hadn’t he, by shooting a farmer’s wife?’

  ‘He was trembling like a leaf when he’d done it. If he hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been talking to me today.’

  That was the size of Gilbert Slack; not for a second had a thought of the Dutch woman ruffled him.

  ‘So you think, speaking as man to man, that he had it in him to kill Hetty?’

  ‘You’ve no right to ask me that.’

  ‘You’re his friend, or so you would have me believe. You can say what you think.’

  I attached little importance to his verbal answer. But I watched his reaction; it could be informative. There was no way of being really sure, but what did he think, beneath all the bluff and the bluster? He had been a petty criminal all his life; he had talked his way out of dozens of scrapes. He was easy to read, but hard to catch.

  I came to the conclusion that he believed Lomas was the murderer; which would mean that he hadn’t killed Hetty himself. But I went on with the appropriate motions.

  ‘And no one told Lomas, in all your years together, that he had gone through an empty ceremony with a married woman?’

  ‘Only Harry and I knew, and we held our tongues.’

  I looked disbelieving, but Slack was firm on the point.

  ‘Don’t you see? Frank would have gone to the padre. We didn’t want that sort of trouble.’

  I jumped through time and space.

  ‘So when you came away from the Chapel?’

  ‘We thought it was the right time to go and see Hetty. We knew Frank was out and he didn’t leave the mine often.’

  ‘And you found –?’

  ‘I never saw anything that sickened me more in my life. Not even in the war.’

  ‘So what did you do about it?’

  ‘Cleared off out of it, mate. That’s one thing we did learn in khaki: not to volunteer for anything, and never to get involved.’

  At least, that rang true. But I was not sure about Gilbert Slack yet. Might not Hetty herself have found the loot? Might she not have decided to set something on one side for her own purposes?

  Had Slack come upon her, yesterday evening, in the act of betraying him too?

  Chapter Nineteen

  I went back to Derby at the end of that afternoon. What had happened there was an unknown quantity. I did not understand why Hetty Wilson had gone there in the first place. I could not see why, if she had wanted to re-attach herself to Frank, she had not simply come up to him in Margreave. And Frank had been vague about it. He only knew what Hetty had told him, and she had not told him much. She had been afraid of him, she claimed; afraid of what her reception might be; she could not face him until they had exchanged letters. It was feasible; I would put it no higher. It did not convince me.

  And how had she found her way to Emma Rice’s? For a woman needing to go to ground in a strange town, with tailor-made shadows to hide in available at a price, the scrofulous boarding-house was ideal. Emma Rice did not ask questions; she did not have to. She made sure she already knew all the answers. She dropped enough crumbs our way, in the normal course of events, to keep herself out of trouble without besmirching her own reputation. So how had H
etty Wilson even heard of her?

  I waylaid P.C. Kewley and brow-beat him until we had reconstructed the meeting between Lomas and the woman in the middle of the road, the ambush that had never happened, with Duncan Mottershead and his minions pinned down under their cover. Our office was frustratingly deserted that evening. I wanted to set colleagues on the track of the stranger who was said to have stayed at the Bell Inn. Ex military, Kewley had said, or a flat-catcher trying to look like one. Not much doubt now who that had been.

  I bought a port and lemon for Tilly Sutcliffe and obtained from her confirmation of much that I already knew. It was not very helpful. Much of Tilly’s so-called information was as speculative as mine, and not very bright speculation at that. I felt fairly certain that the manner in which Hetty Wilson had almost fallen into the hands of Mottershead and his footpads was coincidental to our main concern. Mottershead might have known nothing about Hetty Wilson, might merely have looked on her as potential competition – of some strength! – for his own string of girls. So she would be offered the choice of joining his own team or being seen out of town. One of the odd things about Hetty, in Mottershead’s eyes, must have been her lack of a protector. He must have had his worries about the letter that she was obviously waiting for. The advent of a new, and to judge from Hetty’s quality, somewhat choosey ponce at the back of St Mary’s Gate could have been very disturbing to Mottershead. Or his target might have been much more simple. Robbery with violence was something that happened as and where opportunity offered. Perhaps he thought she might have been carrying the proceeds from pawning another bracelet.

  A cluster of irrelevancies: or were they? I needed to know. It was a strange thing, the effect on a strange town of a woman like Hetty Wilson. I had met others like her in my life: one or two. Wherever they moved, worlds seemed to fall apart all around them, without any effort on their part. A man who takes up with one of them has virtually shot his albatross. Probably Mottershead and his women had been acting purely on something they had sensed.