by Alys Clare
I wasn’t sure if I would remember the way, but it seemed that my unconscious mind must have been taking note of the route, even as I’d ridden along beside Theo listening to the birdsong. Quite soon the little cluster of buildings loomed up on the track ahead of me, the largest of them standing out, taller than the rest. The door was still off its hinges, still leaning against the left-hand wall that propped it in place.
I tethered Hal carefully. I had a sudden horror of something startling him, so that he ran off and left me stranded there. It was an absurd fancy, for Hal was well-behaved and had never once acted like that. But there was something about that lonely place that seemed to haunt; that made the small hairs on the back of the neck stand up in sudden alarm.
I pushed the door aside and strode into the room.
On my previous visit I’d been too preoccupied with the body to take much notice of the surroundings, and I’d observed little beyond the holes in the roof, the dangerously dilapidated state of the walls and the terrible stench. Now there was no body – the room was empty of any living thing save spiders and a buzz of flies in the smelliest corner – and I slowly turned in a circle, looking all around.
An oval of stones indicated where a fire had been built, although now there was no more to see than some charred ends of sticks which, when I bent down to place my hand over them, were cold and dead. There was no neat stack of firewood; no pail of stream water; no indication that someone intended to return here with a snared hare or a clutch of stolen eggs to cook in a tin pan over a friendly little blaze.
I continued my survey.
In the corner furthest from the swarming flies there was a bundle of some sort. Approaching it, I tentatively poked it with the toe of my boot, so that it unwound itself and I saw it was an old blanket, stained, stiff with dirt, holes along one edge as if it had been singed. I crouched down to look more carefully.
I was quite sure it hadn’t been there when the vagrant’s body had been discovered and removed, for if it had, surely Theo would have instructed his men to take it away. He’d been searching for a full identity for the body – he probably still was – and he wouldn’t have left any clue abandoned there.
And that meant that, despite the dead fire, someone had been here since the vagrant’s death.
Fired with sudden certainty, I set about a more thorough search but, other than a pile of pigeon bones in a shallow grave just outside the door which might have been there for weeks if not longer, I found nothing else.
I untied Hal’s reins and mounted. I sat for a while looking around, but there were no other settlements in view.
So where was he?
I reviewed what I did know of his movements and recalled the elderly woman and her henhouse. For want of anything better to do, I turned Hal’s head and rode off in the direction of the little settlement where she lived.
‘No, no, Doctor, I’ve not seen him again, nor had none of my eggs not stolen neither!’ she said when I approached her in the tidy little yard behind her house. ‘I’ve kept my eyes peeled, see, and I’ve had my rattlers handy to scare him off.’ She reached out for a selection of bent and battered old pan lids, loosely tied together with string, and, holding them up, shook them vigorously. They made an appallingly loud noise. ‘Thieves don’t like it if you let ’em know you’ve spotted ’em,’ she said authoritatively, ‘and anyway my neighbours all come running when I bang my pan lids!’ As if to demonstrate the truth of her claim, a woman’s head popped out of a window two doors along. ‘It’s all right, it’s just the doctor!’ the old woman called out cheerfully. The other woman’s expression suggested this was by no means the first false alarm; also that she wasn’t best pleased at her elderly neighbour’s antics.
It seemed that my visit had been in vain, for the old girl had nothing whatsoever to tell me. As I rode off, however, the neighbour called out to me and came running after me. I drew rein and waited for her to catch up.
‘She keeps early hours,’ the woman panted, jerking her head back towards the cottages, ‘and she doesn’t see or hear half what goes on, despite what she’s probably been telling you.’
‘She didn’t tell me anything,’ I replied.
The woman grinned. She had a front tooth missing in her upper jaw, but she was shapely, with glossy dark hair, and otherwise handsome. ‘Then your elevated status must have made her a mite more respectful of the truth than she normally is,’ she said.
‘I’m just a doctor,’ I protested.
‘Exactly,’ she replied. Then she said, ‘There have been other instances of someone lurking around. Her at the end’ – she pointed – ‘had her dog’s old blanket stolen from off the gorse bushes where she’d set it out to air. And there’s been eggs taken from the cottages down there.’ She indicated a shallow little valley where a stream ran and where a small row of dwellings stood huddled together.
‘Has anyone seen the culprit?’ I asked.
She hesitated. ‘Maybe.’
I waited. She was eyeing me and I wondered if she was after a coin or two in exchange for the information. But then she said in a rush, ‘I’m almost embarrassed to tell you because it sounds so silly!’ She laughed uneasily.
‘Tell me anyway,’ I said.
‘It’s the children, see. They say they’ve seen him, more than once. Well, not so much seen him as heard him.’
‘Heard who?’
‘The black giant!’ she said with another embarrassed laugh. ‘Yes, yes, I know how daft it sounds and we all know there’s no such thing as giants, black or otherwise, and the children are making up tales to give themselves a bit of a fright. But they say they’ve seen him hanging around and more than once they’ve followed him, only then he sets up that awful noise again and they get scared and run for home.’
‘What noise?’
She seemed to be struggling with herself. Finally, as if she knew I wouldn’t leave till she’d told me, she blushed prettily and said, ‘It can’t be right, and I know full well they’re just making it up, but they say he sobs like his heart’s breaking.’
I went straight to Theo and when I reminded him that he’d had a large visitor who said he was looking for a lost friend, he had the grace to look abashed. He muttered something about how could one man be expected to keep every last little detail at the front of his mind when other, far more terrible things kept happening, and the very force of his defensiveness told me that he too recognized that this might be very important.
When he’d finished grumbling he said gruffly, ‘I’ll set a watch out there. If it’s correct that the children of the settlement have seen him several times, then it’s likely he’s a creature of habit and will probably return.’
‘Especially since he’s had rich pickings from the neighbourhood, including eggs and a blanket,’ I added.
Theo nodded. ‘I’ll get Jarman Hodge on it,’ he said. ‘I’ll pass on to him what little I know, tell to find our big man, talk to him and bring him in.’ Elbowing me out of the way, he strode to the door of his office, opened it and yelled down the passage, ‘Jarman!’
Jarman Hodge knew the little settlement he was being sent to watch over. He knew almost all the settlements in the area within a radius of perhaps five or six miles, and his knowledge of places further afield was only slightly less sound. He made his way there, found a small hazel copse in which to tether his horse where the animal would be out of sight, found a suitable tree behind which to conceal himself and, with the inexhaustible patience born of long practice, settled down to wait.
He had an excellent view of the little row of houses, with their gardens behind and a variety of henhouses and animal pens, and a more distant but adequate view of the dwellings down beside the stream in the little valley. It was late afternoon, the day still warm and sunny, and there was quite a lot of activity. Men and a few women worked in the fields around the settlement, and more women could be observed busy around their cottages and their yards. A skinny girl emerged and took some washing
off a row of lavender bushes. An old crone went tottering down her garden path to throw scraps to her hens. Some children appeared, apparently from nowhere, chasing each other, the lads shouting and jeering, the girls shrieking in mock-distress. Presently the workers in the fields began to turn for home, and clouds of smoke from some of the cottages suggested fires were being built up to cook the evening meal.
Dusk came down, and Jarman narrowed his eyes to sharpen his vision.
The sounds from the settlement were tailing off, and the last of the visits to the privy before bed being made, when finally his patience was rewarded. He spotted a movement, on the slope above the little valley, and suddenly he was fully alert. Watching closely, he saw a big shape begin to walk, slowly and hesitantly, towards the cottages. The man’s progress – he was so big that surely he had to be a man – would take him quite close to Jarman’s hiding place. Still observing intently, Jarman allowed the huge figure to get ahead, then moved out from under the trees and began soft-footedly to follow him.
The big man went right up to the cottages, then paused and stood still turning his head this way and that as if listening. Apparently satisfied that everybody had turned in and he wouldn’t be disturbed, he climbed over a fence that was no obstacle to someone of his height and went down the path to the henhouse at the end of the garden. He opened the little low door and, when the hens set up a soft, alarmed clucking, he muttered – sang – something that instantly soothed them. Jarman, close now, shook his head in wonder. He’d never come across such a thing before …
The big man had reached inside the henhouse and appeared to have found what he wanted, for already he had extracted his arm and was backing away, careful to fasten the door again. With a surprising turn of speed, he ran back up the path, climbed the fence and was away.
Jarman, a fit man and no mean runner himself, was hard put to it to keep up.
The pursuit seemed to go on for miles, but he was sure this was only because he was so anxious not to lose his quarry. After a time, a small huddle of buildings loomed up ahead, the state of them and the total absence of lights, wood smoke or any other sign of human occupation suggesting they were abandoned. Jarman recalled the description of the little hamlet where the vagrant’s body had been found and he was all but sure the big man was leading him straight to it; perhaps to the very house.
The big man approached a building whose ruined door leant across the doorway. He pushed it aside and went in.
Jarman, moving so quietly that even someone listening out for him would not have heard, crept up close until he was standing right outside. He had expected to hear the sounds and smells of a fire being set and lit, but none came. Instead he heard a sort of slurping, gulping noise, accompanied by a sort of grunting. The big man, it seemed, was consuming his purloined eggs raw.
He must be very hungry, Jarman thought.
He knew he should have gone straight in and addressed the man. The coroner had sent him to do just that: Find him, talk to him, bring him to my office, he had said, and Jarman wasn’t in the habit of ignoring his orders.
But all the same he let the man he’d been sent to find finish his meal. Knowing Theophilus Davey as he did, he didn’t think he would mind.
Presently the sounds of desperately eager eating ceased. There was a soft belch, then a sigh. Knowing he could not postpone what he must do any longer, Jarman pushed past the door and went inside.
It was dark within, with only a little light coming in from the dusk-darkened sky, finding its way through the holes in the walls and the roof. As Jarman’s eyes adjusted, he made out the big man crouched on the floor in the corner. He was bundled into a heavy coat, or cloak, the fabric tight across his vast shoulders. He was bearded, or perhaps it was only that he hadn’t shaved for some time. The hair on his face and that on his head were approximately the same length.
Jarman had been not a little worried that his abrupt arrival inside the big man’s hideaway might precipitate him into some violent reaction, which was alarming, to say the least, since the man was so much bigger and more powerful and could probably have crushed the life out of Jarman with one large hand. But Jarman knew straight away that he was in no danger, for the big man had cowered into his corner, his hands up to his face, and he was peering at Jarman from frightened brown eyes that seemed to glint with tears.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ Jarman said, keeping his voice low and gentle. The alarm in the big man’s eyes did not abate. Moving a little closer – the man flinched away from him – he added, ‘You came to see the coroner, didn’t you?’ No answer except for a whimper. ‘It’s all right, you’re not in trouble’ – at least I hope you’re not, Jarman thought to himself – ‘but you said you were looking for your friend, didn’t you?’ He stepped forward again. ‘Jannie, wasn’t it?’
Very slowly the man nodded. ‘Jannie,’ he echoed.
‘You travelled together, didn’t you?’ Very slowly Jarman lowered himself to the ground, hoping he would present a less threatening figure to this sad, frightened man if he didn’t loom over him. ‘You’d been friends for a long time, yes?’
The man nodded again. ‘Since boys, ja,’ he whispered. ‘I cared for him, protected him.’ A tentative smile stretched the well-shaped mouth. ‘I was big one, I had good fists.’ He held one up, and Jarman had to agree with him.
‘But you became separated,’ he went on. Seeing that the big man hadn’t understood, he said, ‘You lost each other, and that was why you went to see Master Davey, in case he knew where Jannie was.’
The big man nodded again. Something about Jarman seemed to have won his trust, for now he said, ‘Ja, ja, is right, but I was bad, I said Jannie’s name to the man and I was scared, for Jannie said nobody was to know we were there.’ He stopped, frowning. ‘Nobody was to know he was there,’ he amended.
‘I see,’ Jarman said softly. His mind working fast, he went on, ‘He had to get into the house without anybody suspecting he was in the area, didn’t he?’
He was hoping that by pretending he already knew about the mission, this poor, slow-witted man would think it was all right to confide in him. When the big man’s smile came back, wider and more certain now and he began to speak, Jarman felt a stab of guilt at how easy it had been to dupe him.
But then he put the emotion aside and began to listen so intently that there was room in his mind for nothing else.
SEVENTEEN
I knew I’d left the matter of the big man – ‘the black giant’, as the children had named him – in good hands. Theo clearly understood why I’d suggested he should be rounded up, which was good because I’d only told him half the story.
He needed to be questioned, that was certain, because there seemed little doubt that he had known our dead vagrant and in all likelihood shared the lonely ruin on the edge of the moor with him. As an excuse for taking him in, if indeed Theo needed an excuse, there was the matter of the stolen eggs and the purloined dog blanket.
I knew somewhere deep in the folds of my mind that there was much more to it than two wanderers encountering each other on the road and walking side by side for a few miles, days or weeks.
I knew, although I didn’t yet understand, that the heart of this mystery lay at Wrenbeare and so, without telling anyone where I was going, that was where I headed for.
The household was quiet as I approached. As I rode into the courtyard, I expected to see Kit Hammer or Cory, but neither appeared. I dismounted, tethered Hal and walked across to the door. It stood ajar, so I went inside.
I stood in the hall. The light was dim, the flagstones cool beneath my feet. Everything was still. All was quiet.
I went to the foot of the stairs. I called out softly. ‘Mary? Are you there?’
There was no reply.
I went along to the room where, in slightly cheerier, happier times – although those were relative terms and the place had never felt joyful – I had encountered Lady Clemence and her daughters. Where, only two days ago, I ha
d stood over the body of a woman whose heart had been torn from her body.
Agnes Lond sat in a high-backed chair by the fire. Her eyes, wide open, stared down at the empty hearth. She must have heard the sound of my boots on the stone floor but she did not look round. Her husband lay on his side, asleep, on a settle on the opposite side of the hearth.
I drew up a low stool and sat down beside her.
‘I apologize for coming into your house uninvited,’ I said, keeping my voice low. Avery Lond must surely be exhausted, and it seemed unkind to wake him. ‘There was nobody in the yard that I could send to ask for admittance, and, when I came up to the door, I found it open.’
She stirred from her apathy, turning to look at me with faint curiosity. ‘They have gone,’ she said distantly. She sighed.
I studied her. My physician’s instinct told me straight away she was far from well, but as yet I had no clue as to what ailed her. I thought she’d lost weight, for empty folds of skin sagged beneath her heavy jaw as if the flesh had recently and quite suddenly melted out of it. There were hollows in her formerly plump cheeks, and her pale eyes were circled in darkness. Her hair, haphazardly tucked under a plain white cap that was slightly grubby, was rough and dry like a sick hound’s coat.
I said in a whisper, ‘How is your sister?’
She shrugged. ‘Peaceful, thank God.’
Recalling all too vividly the piercing, incessant screams, I muttered, ‘Amen.’
As the echo of the word faded, the silence seemed to intensify.
The first stirrings of alarm began but I made myself ignore them.
‘Mistress Lond, tell me about your father,’ I said, keeping my voice calm and quiet.
‘Father died,’ she said in a faraway tone. ‘He was sick, he raved and thrashed about in his pit of foulness, then his heart burst and he died.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I didn’t think now was the moment to discuss Denyse having witnessed the dreadful death. ‘But tell me about before that. What was he like? What did it please him to do?’