Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  I went to see Emma Rice, in itself a tricky business. I would rather have been taken there by one of my colleagues in the town. We have an agreement about her. She is useful to some, so others are not encouraged to look too closely. Besides, too many of us might confuse her. The Derby inspector would have hated it if ever her boarding-house had been closed down. It formed a very useful focal point.

  Emma Rice and I knew each other, of course; and she did not like me. She did not trust me. But just for once she behaved as if she had been expecting me: as perhaps she had. The murder of Hetty Wilson had reached the evening papers.

  She was pathetically grieved by it. I sat through the rebarbative spectacle of a fat and monumentally immovable woman, sniffing at a sodden twist of handkerchief that she had brought up from somewhere in her accumulation of pleats and folds.

  ‘And such a pretty child.’

  It was always a matter of passing interest what act Emma would put on during any particular visit. Even her legitimate business deals were carried on under some pretence or other.

  ‘You must have talked to her a lot,’ I said. ‘I gather that she didn’t go out much.’

  ‘She was afraid to. A country girl – in all the town traffic. Even from here to the Post Office and back was a torment to her.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And I also gather that someone was dogging her steps?’

  She puckered her brow. Emma Rice’s skin was very white. Her multiple chins hardly moved when she talked.

  ‘She didn’t say anything to me about that. Too modest, perhaps. A girl like that would find men’s steps quickening behind her wherever she went, wouldn’t she? Believe me, it used to happen to me once.’

  ‘I was thinking of something more personal. Someone she was afraid of. Someone she knew, and had been more than half expecting.’

  ‘If there was anything like that, Mr Brunt, it didn’t come to my ears.’

  ‘It’s being said that someone tried to call for her here – a man.’

  ‘Who’s saying that?’

  It was time I showed a little authority. By way of answer, I simply stared her out. She did not have to let that affect her – but now she put on all the facial accompaniment of remembering something.

  ‘A man did come to the door while she was here – but it was not her he was looking for. He had caught sight of her and mistaken her for someone else.’

  ‘You allowed him to confront her, did you?’

  ‘Mr Brunt, a hotel has to protect the privacy of its guests. I spoke to him myself.’

  ‘What sort of man?’

  If she had said that he had two arms, two legs, two eyes and one nose, she could not have told me less. She was constructively unhelpful, and yet contrived to put her last reserves of gravity into the description.

  ‘And why was she staying in Derby. Mrs Rice? What was she waiting for?’

  ‘I’m sure you must already know all about that, Inspector.’

  ‘I would like to compare the story she told you with what she told other people.’

  She sighed, as if this talking was a physical imposition. ‘That she had left her husband in a girlish rage and had written asking his forgiveness. She was waiting his reply.’

  I waited.

  ‘Poor young thing,’ she added. ‘I told her any man would be a fool not to want her back. But then she was worried in case he might think it was only his money she was after.’

  ‘His money?’

  ‘He has made good with a mine, it seems, in the hills out Wirksworth way. I told her not to be so silly. Money’s no good to a man, if he hasn’t a wife to help him spend it.’

  I still waited.

  ‘That’s all there is to tell, Mr Brunt.’

  ‘It isn’t. I want to know how she came to stay here in the first instance. Who made the arrangements? How did she ever come to hear of you?’

  This time she paused before replying. ‘It’s funny you should ask me that, Mr Brunt.’

  ‘Not funny at all, Mrs Rice.’

  ‘I was out at the market when someone came. The entry was in the book when I came back. One of the cleaners had written it in. Although they are strictly forbidden –’

  She thrust one of her hands under herself. Her flesh overflowed from her chair – from which, in fact, she seldom ever moved. I did not believe that she ever went to market. She conducted her manifold businesses from where she sat, and most of her working paraphernalia seemed to be tucked away about her, in folds of fat or clothing. She seemed actually to be sitting on the register of visitors. She brought it out and showed me the entry of Hetty Wilson’s booking. It was written in a different hand from the others: large, printed letters, barely literate.

  ‘Please tell me the name of this cleaner, and her address.’

  ‘It’ll do you no good, Mr Brunt. She’s what you’d call simple.’

  I insisted, for form’s sake, on noting the details. Then I gave up. I heard the click of billiard balls in an adjacent room. I wondered if she had a public licence for the game. If not, I could pull her in under Section II of the Gaming Act of 1845. That was the extent of the depth to which my mind was sinking. I put the thought from me and went to scribble a few operational notes to colleagues in the office.

  I was about to go home when P.C. Kewley came in – in mufti. I knew I had roasted him on to his mettle, and had expected him to get down to some work in his private time. But I had not expected results as quickly as this.

  ‘Found who he is, sir. The books at the Bell are straightforward enough. A man called Wilson.’

  No surprise. It fell flat on my ears.

  ‘We’ll have to have him traced, Constable Kewley.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be difficult, sir. I have his home address too, from the register, and everything has an above-board look about it. Aldershot, Hants.’

  Hetty’s legitimate husband seemed on the face of it to be leading an open and legitimate existence. I was becoming unused to the idea that anyone ever did.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sergeant Clayton, whom I had left in charge at Margreave during my short absence, was not one of my familiars. A newcomer to my section from the Staffordshire borders, I had no working knowledge of him – beyond the certainty that if Rouse at Swadlincote had put him up for promotion, he must have shown himself willing to pull weight. He was a quiet type, did not argue, did not even ask questions. I hoped that this was because he had no need to. I left him with only the broadest of guide-lines; no specific targets and no prohibitions. I let him know that I did regard it as important to keep an ostentations eye on the movements, if possible also the intentions, of those whom we could not arrest, but did not want to pass from our ken. I also privately hoped that he would not upset by tactless interview those with whom I prided myself on having made initial progress. I did not care for the thought of having to make a difficult second start with Frank Lomas or Isobel Fuller. But I did not say this aloud. While I was away, he must do what he saw needed to be done. Clayton could make his first mistake before I started hounding him.

  He met me with the news that Isobel Fuller had been taken ill. At first I took it that this was due to the full shock as comprehension took hold through her fatigue. And I suppose that this was what it was – though no mere pallid collapse. Clayton let it patiently sink in on me that she really was disorientated. Her father – with whom he had worked up a case-work friendship – had told him that she was not even talking continuous sense. He had called in their doctor, who had insisted on isolating her incommunicado. And if this did not actually settle any problems for us, it did at least relieve us of some indecision. I would have dearly liked some knowledge of the content of her delirium, but it was not easy to come by. I told Clayton to question her father and to pump the servants as and when he could, without making a meal of it. I knew how little we could rely on a mixture of rumour and misinterpretation, several times removed from source. Isobel Fuller was effectively inaccessible to us for the time being; but at least
immobilised.

  Two people had been fretting for me during my absence and were pleading for interviews immediately on my return. One was Frank Lomas, and I was gratified to be occupying already the position of chief mentor-in-waiting to him. But I was not sure where to put him on my scale of priorities. Lomas was obviously going to take up a good deal of my time, once I made a proper start on him.

  ‘Does he seem in confessional mood?’ I asked Clayton.

  ‘Bursting to unburden,’ Clayton said. ‘Of everything short of murder.’

  That was as I thought.

  ‘And do you think he is our murderer, Sergeant?’

  Clayton was still in the stage of treating my questions with hyper-prudence. But he understood that I really did want an answer.

  ‘It seems silly, sir – but it seems to me that if he were, he wouldn’t be able to keep it to himself.’

  ‘Not silly at all, Sergeant.’

  The other supplicant was Florence Belfield, and I chose to see her first because as far as I was concerned, she did at least represent something new. I feared from what I had heard of her that I was in for nothing more than a chaos of hallucinations, but what attracted me to her, in my innocence, was that she was the one person in Margreave who was a law unto herself. Making any sense of what she said might be akin to Lomas’s efforts to chip metal out of the gangue; but there might be crude ore there.

  I was in for a morning of surprises, and Florence Belfield provided some of them. Her cottage was situated, as Lomas’s was, within the working radius of an old mine, a single shaft covered with a none too robust wooden hatch, on which stood primitive winding-gear: her stowe. Decades ago, this had been nicked: tally-marks had been cut by the Bar Master at three three-weekly intervals, as a warning that he was dispossessing her. But as there had been no other takers for Badger’s Swallet, she had been allowed to remain indefinitely in the dwelling-house.

  I could only make a guess at her age. She must have been well into her seventies, which meant she had been living in Badger’s since before the Crimean War, when the interior of Africa was still an empty query on the map, and our present King a boy in his teens. She looked brittle, and moved about as an old woman moves; but one had the impression that there were reserves here that she was consciously and jealously guarding for the day when she might need them. In her twenties, following the mining death of her husband, she had inspired and directed an underground war with all its ramifications. In her thirties she had been narrowly saved from drowning in a flooded gallery. Thereafter she had lived on a plane of terror-dreams in a state of alarming penury. Her very survival seemed to have been largely the product of her will.

  Nevertheless, the interior of her cottage bore witness to a certain sense of order. It looked like the home of a woman in whose life a lot was going on. It was not clean, it was not tidy, but it was tolerable. She knew where to find things. There were plans, rolled and unrolled, of her own and neighbouring workings. There were rock specimens on a table, a pestle and mortar with partially crushed ore. There was a blue-print for a now out-of-date beam-engine that might have been used for draining a hillside. If only her husband had lived, the hills about Margreave might have been in a different condition today.

  In her talk the past ran indistinguishably into the present. She knew that a woman had been recently killed in Dead-Nettle, though she did not, of course, know who she was. And it did not seem to trouble her at all, this mixture of knowing and not-knowing. She knew that Frank Lomas was struggling – and failing – to work the mine. She did not remember his name, yet she spoke openly and clearly of the visit she had paid him and she was angry with him because he had not yet, as he had promised, been down to call on her. Yet she could not have said the first thing about him, and accepted her own ignorance as if it was all part of the will of fate – like the alarums and excursions of mine warfare in which she believed herself to be still caught up.

  She knew, too, that I was a policeman, with a footing in stronger places than Margreave. And as I had feared, she wanted to lay information about the villainy of local unworthies, now most of them dead. She was not easily put off: in fact she would not be put off at all, and in the last lap, when she discovered that I was just another of officialdom’s born non-co-operators, I knew I would have to face the wrath of the true virago.

  But for the moment my main concern was not to offend her. Her strange mélange of reason and unreason had a peculiar effect on her fantasies. She had a remarkable command of detail when she was dealing with what was real, and she applied this with equal vigour to her fantasies. Consequently an unwarned stranger on first encounter might be tempted into action by every word she said.

  ‘This man at Dead-Nettle had another man to help him a week or two ago.’

  ‘What other man?’

  ‘The man with the moustache. But they did not stay long in partnership. Barely a morning. I could hear them shouting at each other. The sound travels strangely in some of these underground places.’

  ‘Where were you, then, when you heard them?’

  ‘In Badger’s.’

  She seemed surprised that I should have to ask.

  ‘You still go down into the mine, sometimes, do you?’

  A bad mistake. I could feel her vexation. She was about to dismiss me as being as useless as the rest.

  ‘I’m still working it.’

  Was she incapable of differentiating between her two worlds?

  ‘Mrs Belfield, I think you might be able to help me.’

  ‘It seems to me that the boot ought to be on the other foot.’

  ‘It was you who were the first to discover the dreadful thing that had happened in Dead-Nettle.’

  ‘He’d hit her with one of his gads, Mr Brunt – beaten her with it again and again, as if he were whipping her with a thong.’

  ‘You didn’t actually see him hitting her, did you?’

  She went on talking as if she had not heard the questions. Was this to avoid giving me an answer that might disappoint me?

  ‘It was that Wilbur Thorpe. He used to work for me, but then he went over to Dead-Nettle. That was when Simon Hartle still had the freedom. Before this new man. Long before this new man. I distinctly heard Wilbur Thorpe’s voice.’

  A long time before the new man. She raised my hopes for a moment, but it seemed likely that Wilbur Thorpe was another of those long departed. As a matter of form, I looked him up later in the church register. He was buried in 1863.

  ‘That was one of the things I was going to ask you,’ I said. ‘What made you go over to Dead-Nettle on a night like that?’

  ‘I told you, didn’t I? I heard voices.’

  ‘How many voices did you hear?’

  ‘Well, let me see, who does Simon Hartle have working for him? There’s Wilbur Thorpe and Albert Boardman, Billy Orgill and young Tommy Dawson.’

  ‘You heard them all, did you?’

  Again she did not answer. Were there moments when she caught sight herself of the fact that she was talking nonsense?

  ‘That’s all you heard, was it, voices? You heard them from in here, did you? From inside this cottage?’

  ‘It was a terribly dark night, Mr Brunt. I had to go across the yard. And I could see lights shining across the hollow, in all the windows, up at Dead-Nettle. And the door was standing open. I could see the light shining round that, too. Then I heard the woman scream. She’d screamed before, a night or two ago. He must have been beating her. He must have beaten her the other night, too. But not with a gad that time.’

  For a moment I thought I might still win. She was reliving Sunday night.

  ‘I climbed the hill as fast as I could towards Dead-Nettle deads. But I got there too late. I heard him ride away on his horse while I was still only half way there. When I arrived, the door was still open and she was lying there like something on a butcher’s slab.’

  I took her through it again, but added nothing new to my knowledge. She started to bring Wilbur
Thorpe into the story again, so I tried to move to fresh ground.

  ‘Mrs Belfield, you spoke just now about the man who came to work for a morning with Frank Lomas at Dead-Nettle. They were never in partnership. This other man did not stay much longer than an hour. But you have no idea at all who he was?’

  ‘He was a stranger in Margreave.’

  ‘He wasn’t, Mrs Belfield. He was a young man whom I think you know very well.’

  ‘Tell me his name, then.’

  ‘Gilbert Slack.’

  She looked at me, puzzled.

  ‘Tiggy Slack’s son, Mrs Belfield.’

  ‘Gilbert. Gilbert Slack,’ she said. ‘Gilbert Slack’s been long gone from here. Gone for a soldier.’

  ‘And come back, Mrs Belfield. I’m surprised you didn’t recognise him.’

  ‘I never saw him up close. I only heard his voice.’

  ‘Yet you told me he had a moustache.’

  She saw the reason behind this, but it was when reason stepped in that she seemed most puzzled.

  ‘Gilbert Slack is a bad man, Mr Brunt. He was a bad boy.’

  She got up and opened a cupboard from which she brought out an old sack, which she emptied on to the table: electro-plated trays and sugar bowls. There were a few articles in solid silver: toilet and trinket boxes, an ornate ink-stand, a napkin-ring and a cigar-case in rolled gold.

  ‘Gilbert Slack is a robber, Mr Brunt. It was Gilbert Slack who had hidden all these.’

  If young Slack had thought that he was hoarding a fortune here, then he must have been as impressionable as Frank Lomas at his most naïve. It was all lower middle-class finery: not worth more than a few pounds at the most.

  ‘Where did you find all this, Mrs Belfield?’

  ‘In Dead-Nettle. I had to go there, you see, because Wilbur Thorpe was up to no good in there.’

  ‘When was this, Mrs Belfield?’

  ‘After Gilbert Slack went away. After he went into the army. But I didn’t take them for myself, Mr Brunt. I brought them away for safe-keeping. They’ve been in my cupboard ever since.’